| |  | | | | | SHUTTING DOWN Feed My Inbox will be shutting down on January 10, 2013. To find an alternative service for email updates, visit this page. | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | |  | | | | | The Guardian World News | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Venezuelan president suffering breathing problems from respiratory infection, the government announces in latest update Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is still suffering a "severe" respiratory infection that has hindered his breathing as he struggles to recover from cancer surgery in Cuba, the government said on Thursday. The 58-year-old socialist leader has not been seen in public nor heard from in more than three weeks. Officials say he is in delicate condition after his fourth operation in just 18 months for an undisclosed form of cancer in his pelvic area. "Comandante Chávez has faced complications as a result of a severe lung infection," information minister Ernesto Villegas said in the latest official update on the president's condition. "This infection has caused a breathing insufficiency that requires Comandante Chávez to comply strictly with medical treatment," the communique added, giving no further details. Vice president Nicolas Maduro had earlier returned to Venezuela on Thursday after visiting Chávez in hospital as rumours swirled that the president could be close to death. Flanked by senior government figures including Diosdado Cabello, the head of the National Assembly, Maduro toured a coffee production plant in Caracas - the type of visit that the president made frequently before he fell ill. "He is conscious of the battle that he's in, and has the same fighting spirit as always, with the same strength and energy as always, with his confidence and security," Maduro said. "We're going to be alongside him with the same strength and the same energy." Maduro said Cabello, oil minister Rafael Ramirez and Chávez's elder brother Adan, among others, had all been with the president in the Havana hospital.
Venezuelan bonds rallied to five-year highs earlier on Thursday on rumours that Chávez's health had taken a turn for the worse. Foreign investors generally hope for a more business-friendly government in Venezuela, and its assets have rallied in recent months on news of his illness. In scenes that recalled Chávez's hours-long televised visits to building sites, hospitals and oil refineries, Maduro told workers at the nationalised Fama de America factory that there was no "transition" taking place in the country. "The only transition in Venezuela is the transition to socialism," he said in comments carried live by state television. "It began six years ago, ordered by Comandante Hugo Chávez as chief and president, elected, re-elected and ratified, much as it pains the bourgeois hucksters and the right, who have done so much damage to our fatherland." Chávez's abrupt exit from the political scene would be a huge shock for the South American Opec nation. His oil-financed socialism has made him a hero to the poor majority but critics call him a dictator. His condition is being watched closely by Latin American allies that have benefited from his help, as well as investors attracted by Venezuela's lucrative and widely traded debt. Chávez is still set to be sworn in on 10 January, as spelled out in the constitution. If he were to die or had to step aside, new elections would be held within 30 days, with Maduro running as the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) candidate. While the constitution gives 10 January as the start of a new presidential term, it does not explicitly state what happens if a president-elect cannot take office on that date. Top PSUV officials have suggested that Chávez's inauguration could be postponed - while the opposition says any delay would be just the latest sign the former soldier is not fit to govern. Cabello said the "Chavismo" movement was in pain but remained resolute, and he issued a warning to the opposition: "Make no mistake about these people or this revolution. It is going to cost you very, but very, dearly," he said. On Saturday, Cabello will likely be re-elected as head of the Chavista-dominated National Assembly, a key post that could see him assume Chávez's role temporarily while new elections are called should the president have to step down. In the past Cabello has been considered as a rival of Maduro, but the pair have been at pains to deny that. Their appearance side-by-side at the coffee factory on Thursday looked to be the latest effort to project a unified front. Last year, Chávez staged what appeared to be remarkable comeback from the disease to win re-election to a new six-year term in October despite being weakened by radiation therapy. But he returned to Cuba for more treatment within weeks of his win. Officials have said he suffered unexpected bleeding and then a respiratory infection after a six-hour operation on 11 December. That respiratory infection caused further complications, they have said, without giving more details. The head of the opposition's Democratic Unity coalition, Ramon Aveledo, has accused the authorities of breaking a pledge to keep Venezuelans informed about Chávez's health. And one opposition leader suggested on Thursday that legislators should form an official commission to visit Cuba and assess the president's condition for themselves. Maduro hit back in his televised comments, saying the public had been provided with updates almost every day, and he accused Aveledo of orchestrating a campaign of misinformation. "We have no doubt Mr Aveledo is behind the campaign of sick rumours that began on Twitter and Facebook," Maduro said.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Venezuelan president suffering breathing problems from respiratory infection, the government announces in latest update Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is still suffering a "severe" respiratory infection that has hindered his breathing as he struggles to recover from cancer surgery in Cuba, the government said on Thursday. The 58-year-old socialist leader has not been seen in public nor heard from in more than three weeks. Officials say he is in delicate condition after his fourth operation in just 18 months for an undisclosed form of cancer in his pelvic area. "Comandante Chávez has faced complications as a result of a severe lung infection," information minister Ernesto Villegas said in the latest official update on the president's condition. "This infection has caused a breathing insufficiency that requires Comandante Chávez to comply strictly with medical treatment," the communique added, giving no further details. Vice president Nicolas Maduro had earlier returned to Venezuela on Thursday after visiting Chávez in hospital as rumours swirled that the president could be close to death. Flanked by senior government figures including Diosdado Cabello, the head of the National Assembly, Maduro toured a coffee production plant in Caracas - the type of visit that the president made frequently before he fell ill. "He is conscious of the battle that he's in, and has the same fighting spirit as always, with the same strength and energy as always, with his confidence and security," Maduro said. "We're going to be alongside him with the same strength and the same energy." Maduro said Cabello, oil minister Rafael Ramirez and Chávez's elder brother Adan, among others, had all been with the president in the Havana hospital.
Venezuelan bonds rallied to five-year highs earlier on Thursday on rumours that Chávez's health had taken a turn for the worse. Foreign investors generally hope for a more business-friendly government in Venezuela, and its assets have rallied in recent months on news of his illness. In scenes that recalled Chávez's hours-long televised visits to building sites, hospitals and oil refineries, Maduro told workers at the nationalised Fama de America factory that there was no "transition" taking place in the country. "The only transition in Venezuela is the transition to socialism," he said in comments carried live by state television. "It began six years ago, ordered by Comandante Hugo Chávez as chief and president, elected, re-elected and ratified, much as it pains the bourgeois hucksters and the right, who have done so much damage to our fatherland." Chávez's abrupt exit from the political scene would be a huge shock for the South American Opec nation. His oil-financed socialism has made him a hero to the poor majority but critics call him a dictator. His condition is being watched closely by Latin American allies that have benefited from his help, as well as investors attracted by Venezuela's lucrative and widely traded debt. Chávez is still set to be sworn in on 10 January, as spelled out in the constitution. If he were to die or had to step aside, new elections would be held within 30 days, with Maduro running as the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) candidate. While the constitution gives 10 January as the start of a new presidential term, it does not explicitly state what happens if a president-elect cannot take office on that date. Top PSUV officials have suggested that Chávez's inauguration could be postponed - while the opposition says any delay would be just the latest sign the former soldier is not fit to govern. Cabello said the "Chavismo" movement was in pain but remained resolute, and he issued a warning to the opposition: "Make no mistake about these people or this revolution. It is going to cost you very, but very, dearly," he said. On Saturday, Cabello will likely be re-elected as head of the Chavista-dominated National Assembly, a key post that could see him assume Chávez's role temporarily while new elections are called should the president have to step down. In the past Cabello has been considered as a rival of Maduro, but the pair have been at pains to deny that. Their appearance side-by-side at the coffee factory on Thursday looked to be the latest effort to project a unified front. Last year, Chávez staged what appeared to be remarkable comeback from the disease to win re-election to a new six-year term in October despite being weakened by radiation therapy. But he returned to Cuba for more treatment within weeks of his win. Officials have said he suffered unexpected bleeding and then a respiratory infection after a six-hour operation on 11 December. That respiratory infection caused further complications, they have said, without giving more details. The head of the opposition's Democratic Unity coalition, Ramon Aveledo, has accused the authorities of breaking a pledge to keep Venezuelans informed about Chávez's health. And one opposition leader suggested on Thursday that legislators should form an official commission to visit Cuba and assess the president's condition for themselves. Maduro hit back in his televised comments, saying the public had been provided with updates almost every day, and he accused Aveledo of orchestrating a campaign of misinformation. "We have no doubt Mr Aveledo is behind the campaign of sick rumours that began on Twitter and Facebook," Maduro said.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | US secretary of state, 65, plans to return to work next week after being released from New York hospital on Wednesday The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is resting at home in New York after being treated for a blood clot, and plans to return to her office next week, the State Department said on Thursday. Clinton, 65, has suffered a series of ailments over the past month including a stomach virus, a concussion and a blood clot in a vein behind her right ear. She was released from New York Presbyterian hospital on Wednesday after a stay of several days during which she was given blood thinners to treat the clot.
Her doctors have said they expect her to make a full recovery. "She's resting at home," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters at her daily briefing. "She's looking forward to getting back to the office. She is very much planning to do so next week." The State Department has said that Clinton is keeping up with her work by talking to her staff and receiving memos. Nuland said Clinton on Thursday called into a meeting of the Foreign Policy Advisory Board, an outside group that gives her advice. The group received a briefing on Syria and also discussed energy, climate change and other issues. Clinton has long said she would only serve one term as secretary of state and she is expected to step down in the next few weeks. President Barack Obama has chosen Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to succeed her.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | US regulators force internet giant to agree to change how it presents some search results but exonerated over bias Google has been forced by regulators in the US to agree to legally binding changes to the way it presents some search results and runs its search advertising following nearly two years of investigation. But the internet search engine was exonerated of bias to push down competitors in its search results, leaving it untroubled by any government threat. The Federal Trade Commission attacked the behaviour of its Motorola Mobility (MMI) phone subsidiary, however, which used essential patents to try to block competition and extract huge payments. The watchdog said MMI had engaged in unfair conduct and that Google had continued to do so after buying the company in August 2012. Announcing the FTC's conclusions, Jon Liebowitz, FTC's director, said: "We exhaustively investigated whether [Google] uses search bias" to push its own products higher and rivals' down the search results. But after nearly two years, he said, "the commission has voted to close this investigation. Although some evidence suggested it was trying to remove competition, the primary reason was to improve the user experience." Rivals including Microsoft had said that Google promoted its own services, including videos, shopping and maps, over equally or better-qualified rivals, and pushed down results from competing "vertical search" companies.But the five FTC commissioners disagreed. The long-awaited decision will infuriate Microsoft, which has complained separately that Google is acting as a monopoly by refusing to build a YouTube app for the Windows Phone software it makes – a move that it complains directly harms consumers by restricting choice. Microsoft could demand an investigation by the US department of justice – which 15 years ago prosecuted Microsoft itself on monopoly charges. Google is still in talks with the European commission's antitrust arm over a similar investigation, which could enforce more far-reaching changes than the US regulator has. Google has a far bigger search share in Europe than it does in its home country. The EC has been investigating Google's position in search since November 2010. The FTC, which is the US government organisation meant to protect consumers' interests, had looked ready at the end of December last year to wind up the investigation with a settlement – but delayed the decision after Liebowitz met the EC's antitrust chief, Joaquin Almunia. Under the legally binding agreement with the US watchdog, Google will stop "scraping" content from other sites and presenting it as its own in results, and will allow sites and businesses to opt out of featuring in its "vertical" search results such as Google Local and Google Shopping without that resulting in their being pushed down in general search results. Allegations that Google had threatened to remove companies that opted out were "most troubling", Liebowitz said. He said the investigation had seen nine million pages of documents from Google and other parties, and heard sworn testimony from Google executives. David Drummond, Google's chief counsel, said in a statement: "the conclusion is clear: Google's services are good for users and good for competition" and added "we head into 2013 excited about our ability to innovate for the benefit of users everywhere. But that was not enough for Microsoft. "Hopefully, Google will wake up to a New Year with a resolution to change its ways and start to conform with the antitrust laws," Microsoft's deputy general counsel Dave Heiner wrote in an angry posting on Microsoft's site. "If not, then 2013 hopefully will be the year when antitrust enforcers display the resolve that Google continues to lack." Heiner pointed to Google's continued reluctance to build a dedicated YouTube app for Microsoft's Windows Phone mobile platform — something which it has done for Apple's iPhone after Apple banished YouTube as its default video player. "Google continues to block Microsoft from offering its customers proper access to YouTube. This is an important issue because consumers value YouTube access on their phone — YouTube apps on the Android and Apple platforms were two of the most downloaded mobile apps in 2012," Heiner said. The FTC was hugely critical of Motorola Mobility's (MMI) use of so-called "standards-essential patents" (SEPs) to seek to block sales of smartphones, tablets, games consoles and computers. SEPs must be used to make a device conform to standards such as 3G or Wi-Fi networking — but MMI has sued Apple, Microsoft and others, and demanded swingeing licence fees beyond the perceived value of the patent itself, simply because it is essential to meet the standard. "Years ago, Motorola promised to license those patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms," Liebowitz said. "Other companies took Motorola at its word. They invested billions. Motorola then changed the rules of the game — it sought injunctions and exclusion orders over those SEPs. Google inherited those and continued them." Liebowtiz explained: "Google's unfair conduct threatened to block [US consumer] access to laptops, smartphones, tablets and gaming systems or raise their prices which would have been passed on to consumers — for example an iPad, BlackBerry smartphones are all under threat if this practice continued." Instead, Google would be obliged to license the patents on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms. "We stopped that abuse," Liebowitz said. Google will have to agree that the changes are legally binding rather than voluntary. That would allow the FTC to enforce the commitments and monitor them — and fine Google if it varied from them. Fairsearch, a lobby group of companies including Microsoft and Oracle, as well as smaller travel and search companies, who complain Google is "abusing its search monopoly" said in a blogpost that it "remains convinced that US consumers and innovators deserve the same protections that the European Commission may adopt in Europe. Consumers will fail to reap the benefits of a truly competitive online marketplace if Google is allowed to pick and choose where it biases its search results."
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Organisation in neighbouring town to offer gift certificates in exchange for games, movies and music in wake of shooting A Connecticut community is to hold an amnesty of violent video games in the wake of last month's mass shooting in Newtown. Organisers Southington SOS plan to offer gift certificates in exchange for donated games, which will be burned. The group, a coalition of local organisations, says its actions do not assert that video games were the cause of the killings in nearby Newtown, but argues that violent games and films desensitize children to "acts of violence". Pupils from Sandy Hook elementary school, where 26 people were killed on 17 December, returned to classes for the first time on Thursday in the neighbouring town of Monroe. Sandy Hook elementary is still being treated as a crime scene and it is unclear if it will ever reopen. The video game amnesty will take place on 12 January in Southington, a 30-minute drive east from Newtown. The town of Southington has provided a dumpster, organisers said, where violent video games, CDs or DVDs will be collected. "As people arrive in their cars to turn in their games of violence, they will be offered a gift certificate donated by a member of the Greater Southington Chamber of Commerce as a token of appreciation for their action of responsible citizenship," the group said in a statement. "Violent games turned in will be destroyed and placed in the town dumpster for appropriate permanent disposal." John Myers, chairman of Southington YMCA and member of Southington SOS, was not immediately available to speak to the Guardian, but tech website Polygon reported that the works would be incinerated by town employees. The press release accompanying the announcement said that Southington SOS's action should not be "construed as statement declaring that violent video games were the cause of the shocking violence in Newtown on December 14". "Rather, Southington SOS is saying is that there is ample evidence that violent video games, along with violent media of all kinds, including TV and movies portraying story after story showing a continuous stream of violence and killing, has contributed to increasing aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and is desensitizing our children to acts of violence including bullying. "Social and political commentators, as well as elected officials including the president, are attributing violent crime to many factors including inadequate gun control laws, a culture of violence and a recreational culture of violence." Police in Newtown have still not released a motive for why Adam Lanza killed his mother and 26 others, including 20 children, last month. But experts have disputed the link between violent video games and violence. A study by Texas A&M university last year found that exposure to violent games "had neither short-term nor long-term predictive influences on either positive or negative outcomes". Christopher J Ferguson, one of the report authors, wrote in Time magazine in December that "there is no good evidence that video games or other media contributes, even in a small way, to mass homicides or any other violence among youth". More than 400 students of Sandy Hook elementary returned to classes for the first time on Thursday at a school in Monroe. The school was heavily guarded by police with officers describing it as the "safest school in America", according to the Associated Press. Danbury, the nearest large town to Newtown, had been due to host a gun show this coming weekend but the event was cancelled following the massacre in December. The show, which was set to span Saturday and Sunday, was organised by New York-based Big Al's gun shows but pulled after a number of complaints. A man answering the phone at Big Al's gun shows told the Guardian that the event had been permanently cancelled rather than postponed.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Speaker wins 220 votes to Pelosi's 192 to prevent second ballot, but nine GOP members of 113th Congress vote against him John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, survived a re-election vote when the new Congress met for the first time Thursday, in spite of deep ideological divisions within his own Republican party that have left him badly wounded. In contrast with 2010 when he won the unanimous support of his own party, a small group in the GOP registered their unhappiness with him. He has lost a lot of support over his handling of the fiscal cliff negotiations, and other issues. Although on the surface his majority looks comfortable, Boehner won mainly because warring Republicans could not come up with alternative candidates to unite behind. Only Boehner and the Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi were on the ballot. He won 220 votes, just three more than needed to prevent an embarrassing second ballot, to Pelosi's 192. Nine Republicans voted against Boehner. Ironically, he was saved by some of the members of Congress that have made life awkward for him over the past few years, in particular Tea Party favourite Michele Bachmann. Boehner, before being sworn in, signalled renewed battles with the White House over spending. "Our government has built up too much debt. Our economy is not producing enough jobs. And these are not separate problems. At $16tn, our national debt is draining free enterprise and weakening the ship of state. The American dream is in peril," he said. Boehner, an emotional man who has cried several times in public, almost broke down again during his short speech. His only reference to the bruising battles he has had with the White House and his own party came when he said the voters had not sent members to Congress to make a name for themselves but to act. "We are standing here not to be something but to do something or, as I like to call it, doing the right thing." The new Congress sworn in at noon on Thursday is more diverse by race, gender and sexual preference, and includes a Hindu, a Buddhist, and two female combat veterans. For the first time, white men are in a minority, at least among House Democrats. But, crucially, the political make-up is largely unchanged. There are a few more Democrats and fewer Tea Party-backed Republicans, but essentially the balance remains the same, with the Democrats in control of the Senate and warring Republicans with a majority in the House. The Congress looks on course to be as unproductive as the last one, paralysed by civil war being fought inside the Republican caucus in the House, between the Tea Party-backed members and more moderate and pragmatic ones. Barack Obama has a set out an ambitious second-term programme that includes immigration reform and gun control, but that could be jeopardised by looming battles over spending cuts and the debt ceiling, and the unwillingness of Republicans to work with the president. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, put Obama on notice in speech from the floor of the Senate Thursday. "In a couple of months, the president will ask us to raise the nation's debt limit. We cannot agree to increase that borrowing limit without agreeing to reforms that lower the avalanche of spending that's created this debt in the first place," McConnell said. The standoff between Congress and the White House, and the feuding between Republican members of Congress, mirrors the wider conflict that the November election defeat failed to resolve: whether the Republicans shift even more to the right or pivot towards the centre. Boehner, an old-fashioned, country-club Republican who looks to work out deals with his Democratic counterparts, has struggled over the last two years to keep the two factions together. He was humiliated by his own members before Christmas when he could not persuade them to back his own fiscal cliff plan. He was exposed again this week when a fiscal cliff deal was finally voted on, with only 85 Republicans voting for, including Boehner himself, and 152 against. As well as alienating Tea Party-backed Republicans opposed to the deal, Boehner managed in the same week to alienate more moderate and pragmatic Republicans from the north-east by failing to schedule a vote on aid for towns damaged by Hurricane Sandy, opposed by some Republicans for containing unnecessary spending projects. In the ensuing outcry, Boehner hastily backed down and has scheduled a vote for Friday. One of the moderate Republicans, Steve LaTourette, interviewed by CNN, blamed the pattern of crisis after crisis in Congress – which made it one of the most unproductive sessions in recent US history – on the Tea Party conservatives unhappy with the failure to rein in spending and cut the federal debt. "So as a result, they have laid obstacles in front of the speaker for the last two years," LaTourette said. The divisions in the Republican party are unlikely to be resolved until at least the next congressional elections, the mid-terms in 2014. Democrats will urge voters to end the Washington deadlock to give them a majority in both the Senate and House. Voters could resolve it, too, by turfing out the Tea Party-backed members, as they did in November when they opted not to re-elect congressman Allen West, a Tea Party favourite who denounced Obama as a Marxist ideologue. Or they might opt to punish moderate Republicans, as representatives of the Tea Party movement threatened to on Thursday. Amy Kremer, the leader of Tea Party Express, expressed outrage over the fiscal cliff deal, said on Twitter: "There will be consequences." One of the biggest fears of moderate Republicans is finding themselves facing primary battles in their districts or states, up against Tea Party-backed candidates. If the civil war is not resolved in 2014, the battle then moves onto the 2016 presidential nomination, beginning with the Iowa caucus. That fight is already under way. The present favourite is Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida with the Cuban background, who might help the party win back some of the Latino vote from the Democrats. He is also a Tea Party favourite, and could be the figure that brings the warring factions together. Rubio was one of the few Republican senators to vote against the fiscal cliff deal, leaving him able to claim ideological purity and retain Tea Party support. On the other side of the spectrum is New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who spent most of a 40-minute press conference on Wednesday denouncing Boehner and Republicans in the House for failing to support aid for his state's devastated communities. He criticised the intrigue that has engulfed the House Republicans as one of the reasons why the public have come to hate Congress. Christie is often mentioned as a potential runner for 2016. Conservatives then face a dilemma, balancing Christie's popularity against his liberal views, including ambiguous positions on issues such as gun control. Boehner cannot even rely on his own lieutenants, the House majority leader Eric Cantor and the House whip Kevin McCarthy, both of whom voted against the fiscal cliff deal. Cantor is a another potential runner in 2016, but he will have lost the support of some of his colleagues, having encouraged them to vote for the deal and then voted against himself. Romney's vice-presidential running-mate Paul Ryan could also be among the runners in 2016. Generally regarded as a fiscal conservative, he surprised his colleagues by voting for the deal.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Qatari-based broadcaster plans to launch New York-based news channel on network it has bought for reported $500m It has won respect and awards for its street-level reporting of the Arab spring protests, and attracted dedicated audiences in 130 countries, but when it comes to the most lucrative media market of all – the US – al-Jazeera has struggled to make an impact, reaching only a tiny minority of American households. On Wednesday, the Qatari-based broadcaster signalled its ambition to change that, paying a reported $500m (£300m) for the cable network Current TV, in a deal that could leave Current's co-founder, former US vice-president Al Gore, $100m better off. Al-Jazeera said it planned to launch a New York-based news channel on the network, likely to be called al-Jazeera America, saying it hoped to "make a positive contribution to the news and information available in and about the United States". The new channel will be separate from the existing al-Jazeera English, which broadcasts from Doha. For the cash-rich al-Jazeera, which only 4.7 million households in the US can currently watch, the benefits of the purchase are obvious. Though Current TV has struggled to attract significant audiences since its establishment as a liberal news and analysis channel in 2005, its distribution deals give it a potential reach of almost 60 million US homes. But the Middle Eastern broadcaster, which is owned by the emir of Qatar, faces challenges in its bid to become a mainstream US network, notably a lingering suspicion among viewers and distributors about its Arab origins and political position. Time Warner Cable Inc, the second biggest US cable company, immediately dropped Current TV on the news of its sale, without commenting on its reasons. Though Time Warner Cable's chief executive, Glenn Britt, said last month that it would take a firmer line on renewing channels with low ratings, some media analysts saw the move as politically motivated. In a memo to staff on Wednesday, Joel Hyatt, Current TV's co-founder and chief executive, said only that Time Warner "did not consent to the sale to al-Jazeera". He said: "This is unfortunate, but I am confident that al-Jazeera America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years ahead." Gore and Hyatt said in a statement: "Current Media was built based on a few key goals: to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling. Al-Jazeera, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us." The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has praised al-Jazeera's coverage of the Arab spring in the past, saying the network provided "real news". But despite a campaign urging viewers to press their local distributors to carry al-Jazeera, the channel has until now been unable to extend its reach beyond a few isolated pockets of the US. Al-Jazeera's director general, Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, said of the purchase: "US viewers have clearly demonstrated that they like the way al-Jazeera provides compelling, in-depth news to audiences across the world. Everyone at Al Jazeera takes great pride in the independence, impartiality, professionalism and courage of our journalism. I look forward to bringing these standards to our new American audiences and working with our new colleagues at Current." Gore and Hyatt have been seeking a buyer for Current TV for some months, amid pitiful ratings that averaged 22,000 households between January and November 2012, despite having 59 million paying subscribers, according to the Wall Street Journal. By comparison, CNN averaged 700,000 households in the same period, and Fox News 1.9 million. They resisted selling the channel to the rightwing talkshow host Glenn Beck, the Wall Street Journal reported, telling Beck that "the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view".
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Transocean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, settles over criminal and civil charges Transocean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig at the centre of BP's Gulf of Mexico blowout, has reached a $1.4bn settlement with the Department of Justice to settle criminal and civil charges. The Swiss-based rig operator has been in the dock since April 2010 saw the worst spill in American history. The $1bn in civil penalties and $400m in criminal ones is in line with what the company was expecting. A formal statement had not been released on Thursday night but sources in the US confirmed the two sides had reached a deal far lower than the $4.5bn agreed by BP, which only covered criminal claims. Shares in Transocean soared 10% as Wall Street investors saw a major cloud being lifted. Transocean had said in a regulatory filing three months ago that it had discussed a $1.5bn settlement with the DoJ but had set aside a $2bn fund for paying claims related to the Macondo disaster, when 11 lives were lost. Despite the problems BP reported profits of more than $25bn for 2011 but Transocean recorded a loss of about $5.7bn, hit by contingencies for the Deepwater Horizon and other market problems. In November Transocean reported a $381m quarterly financial loss and unveiled plans to sell off 38 shallow-water rigs to concentrate on the more lucrative deep water drilling end of the market. The company has been awarded 10-year contracts by Shell for four new drillships which will suck in $7.6bn of revenue from 2015 and the following year, and it has had a ban partially lifted that would have kept it out of the growing Brazilian offshore sector. This followed a 2011 oil spill by operator Chevron.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Recently re-elected president has undergone his fourth cancer-related surgery and his health is said to be 'delicate' Senior Venezuelan leaders have gathered in Cuba where Hugo Chávez is recovering from his fourth cancer-related surgery, amid growing speculation that the recently re-elected president will be unable to attend the 10 January inauguration of his fourth term in power. Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly, and Chávez's brother Adan, a regional governor, joined the vice-president, Nicolas Maduro, in Havana where Chávez underwent surgery three weeks ago. Maduro described Chávez's health as "delicate" after reporting on New Year's Eve that the oil-rich nation's leader had suffered a new complication from a respiratory infection. On Wednesday night, Jorge Arreaza, the minister of science and technology and Chávez's son-in-law, wrote on Twitter that the president was stable despite his serious condition. "Commander Chávez continues to fight hard, and sends all his love for our fatherland," he wrote. But there have been no official announcements on the president's health, and in the absence of any facts Venezuelans are facing growing uncertainty over the health of their leader, and the future of their country. The constitution stipulates that if Chávez were unable to take power, presidential elections must be called within 30 days. But Cabello, the current head of the legislative body, has said the constitution leaves room to interpret that the oath into power could be taken at a later time and in an undetermined place. Cabello has repeatedly said that President Chávez is Venezuela's only legitimate leader and that the date of the inauguration can be extended until Chávez is fit to govern. On Thursday, the minister for information, Ernesto Villegas, asked Globovision to issue a correction after the TV news channel referred to Maduro as the president in charge. "I would like to remind you that the only president in power of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is Hugo Chávez, who won the 7 October election with 8,191,132 votes", Villegas said in a letter to Globovision. In a televised nationwide address before undergoing surgery, Chávez instructed that, according to the constitution, Maduro should take over power if he were unable to govern. He also asked Venezuelans to vote for Maduro when elections were held.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | John Boehner bids for re-election as Speaker of the House of Representatives as the 113th Congress is sworn in
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | More than two years after Manning's arrest, the man who gave him up talks to Ed Pilkington about how he made the decision
Bradley Manning and me: why I cannot regret turning in the WikiLeaks suspect Ed Pilkington: Let's start with the reason we're having this IM chat: Bradley Manning. We heard Manning himself recently describe his treatment during the nine months he was held in Quantico marine base on suspicion of having leaked hundreds of thousands of confidential US documents and videos to WikiLeaks. Have you been following the proceedings, and if so how closely? Adrian Lamo: My only exposure to the proceedings right now is the things that people ask me whether I've heard. That sometimes disturbs folks' sense of perspective, as though it's wrong of me to have more to my life than Bradley Manning. It's not because I take it lightly, but because I take it as seriously as I do. Making the choice to interdict a man's freedom knowing it could mean his life, is something that's easy to judge but can only really be understood by living it. You either fold it into your character, come to terms and go on with your life, or you get stuck in that moment forever. For a while I thought I would be. I took it badly. But I came to terms and continued my life some time ago. It has, after all, been two years.
EP: We heard harrowing testimony from Manning. Locked in his 8x6ft cell for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day, stripped naked at night, made to stand to attention at morning call in the nude. And on and on … I appreciate that you might not want your life to be stuck on Manning, but hearing such details must have an impact on you. Did you expect him to face such harsh treatment when, as you put it, you chose to interdict his freedom by passing his details to the FBI? AL: As a clarification, I co-operated with the Department of Defense in this matter, not the FBI. This is the army's prosecution, and while there's some overlap, the FBI is looking at another spectrum of issues. To speak to your question, I don't have first-hand knowledge of his conditions while detained. But a lot of choices by a lot of people went into taking this case where it is today. It's clear the circumstances would be very different if it weren't for my involvement, but you can only label something a proximate cause within so many degrees of separation of what it's putatively causal of. Even so, as I stated, I knew my actions might cost him his life. In that respect, any other outcome is preferable. EP: OK, so let's go back in time and look at what happened in May 2010. Why in your view did Manning pick you out of the cybersphere to be his confidant? AL: There are a lot of possible reasons, but only he knows which one moved him. With something so speculative, there's no real right answer.
EP: It has been suggested by some of your critics that you did not innocently engage in the web chat with Manning, but that you were somehow put up to do it as a sort of honey trap. Were you?
AL: Heh. I needed a good laugh. Not being sarcastic, it's just so very implausible. The logs are not in dispute. It was suggested otherwise for a long time, but the proponents of that idea – [former hacker] Kevin Mitnick for one – have gradually found fresher theories to push. Looking at the interaction going in, he's eager to disclose what he's done, while I'm at points almost uninterested at first – wandering away from the keyboard at various points. But more pragmatically, the cast of characters is just bizarre. You have me, you have Kevin Poulsen [of Wired magazine, which published the web chat] writing the story, and then a good number of my long-time associates in other key roles later on. If you wanted a situation that didn't seem outlandish, that ain't it. The way it played out seems like something that could only happen in a movie, not anything you could propose as covert action with a straight face. EP: It's clear from the web chat that he was crying out to you for help. "I'm honestly scared," he said. "I have no one I trust. I need a lot of help." How did you feel when you read that? AL: His statements there – and others, such as his reference, seemingly in half-jest, to having his firearm ready after I mentioned (I think) that I'd been away from the keyboard for a phone call, and his anecdote about striking a fellow soldier – did seem to indicate personal issues which might be coming to a head. But however I personally felt about his issues, his motives, and his state of mind didn't matter, and could not factor into what I did. The choices at hand were very blunt ones – to interdict him, or to pretend I'd never had my conscience as shocked as it was when I learned of the sheer volume of sensitive documents he had extracted to WikiLeaks. There was no option to interdict just the documents and put him merely in touch with counseling. There was no way to be both kind to Bradley and mindful of the potential for harm to people I had never known and would never know which the situation posed. The reader might think there was some more moderate choice that I overlooked but I looked closely, and no such choice existed. There's a science fiction story from 1954 or so by Tom Godwin, called The Cold Equations. It's about, in summary, a space shuttle, a stowaway, a pilot, and a far-off research station. Specifically, about a young girl who's stowed away not realizing that her slight excess weight would doom the flight of badly-needed medical supplies unless she was ejected. At its heart, it's a story about how much we might feel for someone and how little human feeling means against the weight of numbers. There were hundreds of thousands of documents – let's drop the number to 250,000 to be conservative – and doing nothing meant gambling that each and every one would do no harm if no warning was given. In the story, the stowaway is ejected from an airlock not because no one felt for her, but because everyone felt for her, wanted to help her, but all those feelings didn't matter a damn against the reality of the situation. EP: Early on in your chat with Manning you reassured him about your trustworthiness, telling him you were a journalist and a church minister and that either way he'd have legal protection against his identity being revealed. That was clearly misleading, as things transpired, and your critics have accused you of lying to Manning by promising him protection. Do you regret having done that? AL: Professionally and personally speaking, it's not my function to have people arrested. That's something that would ideally fall to law enforcement. In this matter, the harm from the subject's continued freedom appeared to objectively be greater than the harm of interdicting him. The offer was never meant to be construed as a suicide pact, and no one had ever mistaken it for one. In the specific context of the logs, it's also relevant to note that the offer was never affirmatively accepted – it proposed two possible conditions, and one was never chosen. EP: I want to press you on this point. If a priest, or a journalist, promises to protect someone's identity or confession, they can't then turn round and say: 'Oh, you've told me something bad, therefore I'm going to turn you in.' By telling Manning you would protect him (whether or not he accepted your offer) didn't you make pact, a vow, that couldn't be broken? If I tell a source of mine that I will protect his or her identity, I mean it. AL: The two choices aren't fungible. They're distinct things, each with their own set of boundaries. In each case the law relating to privilege has exemption for exigent situations as the conscience sees them. Assuming the offer had been taken up and we'd gone forward – if I'd been a doctor or a counselor, the same would have been true – the law recognizes that privilege is not, as I said, a suicide pact. Meaning that once you enter into it, you're not bound to it no matter how much harm will arise. I'd have a much harder time saying with a straight face: "Well, he told me about the largest classified material breach in the history of western intelligence, but I wasn't supposed to tell anyone." EP: What you've just said, and what you write in an article which the Guardian is posting along with this IM chat, hinges on the idea that by leaking state secrets to WikiLeaks, Manning was likely to cause great harm. But Manning made clear in his dialogue with you that he was in the process of being discharged from the military and that his security clearance had been restricted. Didn't that suggest that the threat he posed – to the extent it existed – was in the past? AL: I think it's pretty clear that from a computer security standpoint – as some might say, from the standpoint of a hacker – there's no such thing as revoked access, only more complicated access. The threat only existed in the past from the point where he was interdicted on. His detention provided the United States with months of warning on the disclosures that were to come – months to prepare for the threat which those would pose which would not otherwise have been afforded to them. The details of that warning took Manning with them. One could not be separated from the other. I'm satisfied that such an early warning was both necessary and critical in mitigating the harm done. EP: But in making that decision to sound an early warning – by going to the DoD – weren't you setting yourself up as judge and jury over Manning? And if so, what gave you the authority to make that judgment any more than Manning himself, or for that matter WikiLeaks? AL: At age 13, I was violently mugged at a busy train station. There were dozens of onlookers, but none of them lent a hand. It was as though they couldn't see what was obviously happening in front of them, and if they did, couldn't justify to themselves the risks of getting involved. That was a defining point in that stage of my life. After that, I could never tell myself that it was someone else's problem, or let a situation pass me by if I felt something had to be done. I knew from experience that all too often, no one else would act. My authority was that I was the only person who could make that choice. I knew that people would fret about what might have been, would second-guess, offer alternatives in hindsight. People always do. And invariably, none of those who do were there for the situation as it unfolded, or had to make that choice – have probably never had to make that kind of choice about a human life. But they're sure they know what they would have done, if only they'd been lucky enough to be there. EP: In your piece you say you were faced with making a "cold, needful" choice. Yes, but … you are also a human being. It can't be possible purely to intellectualize a decision of that magnitude. After all, as you said earlier in this IM, you thought at the time you shopped Manning that he could face the death penalty. So tell me, honestly, in yourself, what were you thinking, feeling knowing that you might at that moment be sending a man to his death? AL: To a greater or lesser extent, we all do things in life that we don't really want to. We might avoid it when possible, but we can't do it all the time. The very definition of irresponsibility is avoiding unwelcome choices wholesale. I'm sure I had feelings about it at the time. But now, over two years later, I can't tell you what that was like. To your more gentle-hearted readers, that might seem quite monstrous. It might have to me at one point. But as smart and as prepared as I thought I was, there was simply no way to understand how the mind bends to adapt itself without living it. No way to explain it at all. EP: "I was badly off for a while," you say. I can imagine you were. You were denounced as a "snitch" and the "world's most hated hacker". I think you've even said you were forced into hiding. So how are things now? Have things got better for you after more than two years? Can you tell us, for instance, where you're living now, or are you still keeping out of the public eye? AL: Most of my daily life comes and goes without involving WikiLeaks or Bradley Manning. My security situation remains complicated, but not for the same reasons as a year or two ago. In many ways it's better. I had quite the substance abuse problem for a while. That's hardly unknown, and I'd feel dishonest doing this IM without speaking to it. I was in a period of recovery when I first met Brad, but as with such periods in many people, it didn't last, at least not that particular time. But coming to grips with how I felt about the whole situation helped to put a stop to that, helped me to cope on my own. Ironically, that's one of the best things to happen in my life in recent years, both in my personal and professional life. In contrast to that, having to keep my eyes open doesn't trouble me much. I'd always been one to keep my eyes open. EP: Just a couple of final questions before we wrap. They both involve that wonderful thing, hindsight. In hindsight, isn't it the case that actually the data that Manning leaked, massive in quantity though it was, did very little damage at all? And that it did a lot of good – take for instance the exposure of Middle East corruption, and the video of the US Apache helicopter attack on civilians in Iraq which WikiLeaks released as "Collateral Murder"? So wasn't your assessment of the damage that the leaks would cause, in hindsight, over-dramatic? AL: Not long after the files were released, the Taliban announced that they were combing poorly redacted contact logs for the names of Afghani nationals who were assisting security forces in postwar Afghanistan. Even if that were the sole data point, I'd remain convinced that months of warning is a hell of an important thing to give someone before the date of their potential execution. WikiLeaks has a history of hand-waving away the consequences of their disclosures. When documents they released were linked to violence in Kenya, Julian Assange said, apparently to the Observer, that "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak," going on to compare those numbers to the statistics of other deaths in Kenya – to paint death as a normal part of Kenyan existence, as it were. Assange went on to say "… we are not about to leave the field of doing good simply because harm might happen", and that if anyone were conclusively killed because of WikiLeaks, they could take comfort knowing: "Well, we will review our procedures" upon proof of their death. I have a different vision of good, one where high ideals don't excuse any crime or atrocity because someone meant well. EP: One final question based on hindsight. With everything we now know – including the way Manning was subjected to treatment that the UN likened to torture, and the fact that though he won't face the death penalty as you initially feared he does face possible life in military custody – would you make the same decision again? AL: People are always asking me whether I'd have done the same if I'd known [x] or had foresight of [y]. Questions like that sound good in theory, but ultimately what they're asking is: "If linear time collapsed into itself and you were suddenly aware of every possible outcome, what would you do?" The thing is, it's not a question that can be answered. One of the great things about life, I think, is that we don't get do-overs. I don't think idealism could survive if we did. Let me ask you for example, before this conversation, had you ever heard of a man named Frank Wills? EP: No, can't say I had. AL: Wills was the security guard at the Watergate in June 1972. Depending on how you look at it, he was either in the right place at the right time, or should never have gone to work that day. He died at the age of 52, in poverty after problems seeking employment due to his connection to the incident. He died five years before the identity of "Deep Throat" Mark Felt was revealed, but his death merited only a cursory obituary on page B7 in the regional section of his local paper. From his point of view, would he have made the same choice again? I'm not going to try to answer that. No one could.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | When I met Bradley Manning online in 2010, he reminded me a lot of myself at his age. We both acted out of social responsibility
Lamo on Manning: 'I knew my actions might cost him his life' While each person brings their own perceptions to an issue, few have generated so much controversy sourced from so little context as my own on the day I electronically met Bradley Manning, in 2010. As with most things, there's more to it than the facts: I write this with the intent that you factor this into your narratives and truths on this issue as you best see fit. In 2003, when I was 22 years old, I spent a period of time wanted by the FBI, for crimes I felt to be well-intentioned, even warranted. Spending a good deal of time on the Internet exercising what might be best-defined as weaponized curiosity, I'd decided that, as long as I was engaging in unauthorized network intrusion – some call it "hacking"; I personally never did – I might as well go about it in what I believed to be a socially responsible manner. I also thought perhaps to advance the dialogue on responsible disclosure on certain topics. Internal networks of some of the largest and most infrastructure-critical companies in existence at the time fell victim in this course of conduct; I won't bore you with the list. It's safe to say, at the time, the security community was pretty well aware that this was happening, and my conduct was nothing if not criminally transparent. What was less widely-known was that my access to a corporate intranet was a means, not an end. Once in – often by proxy (the computer kind) – I had no more access than the freshest intern. I would thereafter spend days mapping out the internal workings, finding further insecure critical systems, picturing the structure in my own mind, and extracting data. I once spent over 24 hours at a San Francisco Kinkos copy shop doing so for a particular network. Given that I neither requested nor accepted any compensation from the companies involved, I can tell you in retrospect, it was a labor of love, albeit an illegal one. The reason that this kind of exploration went less documented is that the public largely never saw it. Headlines tend to run to "Lamo hacks [X] corporation network", rather than a "Lamo gains access needed to fire Bernie Ebbers and turn off Bank of [redacted] network". I won't deny that I kept fairly vast amounts of data – I last saw it on a bridge somewhere – but I also kept it in close quarters. It was kept this way for cause. As I read these documents, as I saw outlined arcana of critical infrastructure chokepoints, previous and existing wiretaps and pen registers, satellite control, offices and personnel of three-letter agencies, lists upon lists of passwords and access codes, how to access emergency communications in the event of a nuclear war, the occasional odd person who was supposed to be dead, etc – the thought that we would all be better-off if the public saw them never occurred to me. The very reason I was reading these things is that they were beyond the ken of the public, and involved matters that I sometimes knew very little about. I tried to be socially conscious about what I was doing; throwing what I saw to the wind wholesale for public consumption was never an option – any more than going in for the sake of deleting it would have been. The public would never know how to use it safely, or be informed about its context. As a raw data dump, they literally would not have been able to handle the truth – if in fact I had any truth to give. It wasn't that I didn't want people to know the truth. It was that I couldn't tell them the truth. I could only tell them facts, and facts without meaning are the very enemy of truth. I said once that lies have no rights against truth. I was wrong. In daily life, it's the truth that's disenfranchised. What fits the popular narrative, what makes an observer happy with the consistency of events, is what is believed. I could give people facts, but only in a disjointed, abrupt way that would be absorbed by their perception as they best validated their respective storyline – for I had no better one to give them. Against that kind of validation, the truth is only ever a fringe theory. More convenient beliefs are the incumbent. There's a second tier here. I've said I tried to be socially responsible, even that to respect the privacy of others in my intrusions. But while I honestly had only good intentions, I was not fully informed myself as to the consequences of what I was doing might be for others. I've also said it was a crime for which I would take responsibility if it came to that – and I said that well before the FBI came looking – and that having good intentions about my conduct did not excuse it. While I've made endless lighthearted fun of the FBI, I understood then and now that they had a mission to fulfill: it was their function to act their part. So when they finally did, I can't say I found the whole thing particularly surprising or in violation of any human right to extract non-public data. I can allow that it was Kafkaesque, but it would have seemed drab any other way. These things happen. Since my guilty plea in that case, I have majored in journalism, written locally, and enjoyed light press photography as a non-criminal exercise of my curiosity. And I was, in 1998, ordained a ULC minister. I was also pretty regularly contacted by hackers wanting to talk about my story, or theirs, so I developed a disclaimer for conversations that might be entering dubious territory, involving elements of legal privilege available to the clergy and to the press. On its face, it is understandable that such a disclaimer, if not adhered to, would be overtly duplicitous. But when it was offered, there was no reasonable expectation that merely sentences later, I would be faced with the choice between interdicting the freedom of the man in the IM window, or gambling that no part of literally hundreds of thousands of classified documents would intersect harmfully with the life of any person affected by their contents. None of this happened in a vacuum; my duty was not to Manning alone. The avalanche had started, as Ambassador Kosh once observed. It was too late for the pebbles to vote. In the intersection between the one and the many, there was no clemency in numbers. At the time of our conversations, Bradley Manning was 22 years of age – my own age when I made the choice to surrender to federal authorities. He was curious; I hope he still is. He was ideologically motivated from a position he saw as well-intentioned, and he represented his motive as social responsibility in the pursuit of a wider benefit regarding disclosure of certain information. I saw someone very familiar that day, and suddenly felt very old. As much as ever, I feel that curiosity in itself is no crime. But curiosity is a force, of its own kind. As with any use of force, it must be proportionate, responsible, and ever-informed by the caution that just because we can do a thing, it does not follow that we must do that thing. And like any force, it is agnostic to the intent of its wielder. When I say that my choice was a consistent one, that's exactly what I mean. I don't say that it was the right one – there were no right choices that day, only less wrong ones. It was cold, it was needful, and it was no one's to make except mine. It hinged on the very values that had led up to that point. What I decided then I had truly decided long before, in deference to the hubris of believing that the masses only await our touch in order to to be enlightened. In that sense, I remain who I have always been.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Parents take 16-year-old daughter to police station after testing kit confirms suspicion milkshakes were laced with sleeping drug Two teenagers looking for a little fun in a quiet northern California suburb have been accused of getting around a late-night internet ban by lacing milkshake with ground-up sleep medication and serving it to one of the girl's parents. The mother and father of a 16-year-old girl in Rocklin, California, were in the habit of shutting off the home internet at 10pm. In order to get round the curfew, their daughter and a 15-year-old friend offered to pick up shakes from a fast-food restaurant, which they then allegedly drugged. According to police, the parents thought the shakes had an odd taste and stopped drinking them. An hour later, the parents were asleep, and the girls were able to use the internet as they pleased. The parents reported hangover-like symptoms when waking up at about 1am, and again in the morning. Unsure why, they bought a $5 drug testing kit at the local police station to test themselves. When the results came up positive, they returned to the police station with their daughter. Lieutenant Lon Milka of the Rocklin police department told the Guardian that detectives were still investigating how much medication had been used in the shake. He said the medication had been provided by the visiting friend, from her home in the neighboring town of Roseville. California laws limit how much information law enforcement officers can provide on juvenile cases, but Milka said of the parents: "They developed enough information in order to bring their daughter down here." The girls have been charged with willfully mingling a pharmaceutical into food and conspiracy. The were booked in Placer County juvenile hall on New Year's Eve. Police have not disclosed what the girls were using the internet for. Most juvenile crimes in the town of over 58,000 people are minor offenses like vandalism, alcohol and drug use. "Nothing where they are endangering or mingling the pharmaceuticals with the milkshake – that is way out of line," Milka said. A child therapist in Sacramento told the Sacramento Bee that while it is good for teenagers to express their individuality, drugging ones parents "would not be a healthy level of rebellion".
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Anti-Leung protesters bring array of demands, such as higher pensions and the protection of gay rights Some see a wolf. Some see a liar. Some see a true-to-form Communist Party official taking aim at Hong Kong's political autonomy. Others see the territory's highest official, Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying, as a potential antidote to some of its most pressing issues: a widening wealth gap, lagging economic growth, and property prices so high that whole families are crammed into apartments the size of walk-in closets. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to Hong Kong's densely-packed streets this week in demonstrations both for and against Leung, laying bare widespread distrust of the recently-elected leader and deep-rooted divisions among the region's 7 million people. While anti-Leung demonstration organisers said 130,000 people attended the protests, police put the number at 27,000. Protesters filled public parks and blocked major intersections. Some clashed with police, leading to six arrests. Protesters came with a wide array of demands, such as higher pensions, protection of gay rights, the cessation of controversial development plans on the region's suburban fringes. Some held up pictures depicting Leung as a wolf, a reference to his perceived ruthlessness; many demanded his resignation. The former British colony has technically been administered by mainland China under a "one country, two systems" policy since 1997, but it still enjoys institutions that are non-existent on the mainland such as a free press. Leung's troubles began in the autumn when Hong Kong media revealed he had built a set of illegal additions on his property – a trellis, a metal gate, a canopy over his garage – six months after he defeated his main political opponent, Henry Tang Ying-yen, partly by chastising him for digging an illegal cellar beneath his villa. Leung is also still reeling from a large-scale backlash against a Beijing-backed "national education" programme proposal, which would have added a pro-Communist Party course to the region's elementary school curricula. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents protested against the programme, calling it "brainwashing" – some staged a hunger strike. The proposal was ultimately shelved. "The feeling is that [Leung] discredited himself over the past six months or so because of mishandling of major crises," said Ray Yep, a professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Yep added that Leung's promises to ameliorate the region's sky-high property prices and growing income gap sets him apart from his predecessors. "We see the intention to do something, which is in a way better than the previous government, which wanted to let the market regulate itself in the long run," he said. "But so far we don't see any concrete action." Michael DeGolyer, a politics expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, described Leung as a beleaguered populist who has not yet cinched widespread support, but who has also not yet proven himself a public villain. "Every substantive element, such as support for the poor, greater education, small class instruction, environmental action, right across the board, he's basically taking the fire away from the opposition camp," he said. DeGolyer added that Monday's demonstrations paled in comparison to a 500,000-person march in 2003 which unseated the region's first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa. He said that those protests were fuelled by widespread dissatisfaction with years of incompetent governance. Leung has only been in office for six months. Tuesday's turnout "wasn't nearly high enough to indicate that there was enough support for the Beijing government to even consider setting Leung aside early," he said. "Calls for him to step down were wholly symbolic." On the mainland, many users of China's most popular microblog, Sina Weibo, sided with the anti-government camp, with many expressing a strong desire for political freedoms beyond their reach. "Mainlanders should humbly learn from Hong Kong's non-violent protests and freedom of speech," wrote one user in a widely-circulated post. Others decried pictures of protesters proudly brandishing the British colonial flag. While some Hong Kong residents equate the flag with nostalgia for a relatively liberal last few years of British rule, many mainlanders perceive it a symbol of national humiliation. Microblogs quickly filled with invective against "Hong Kong traitors". Censors have since deleted most of the images. • Additional research by Chuan Xu
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Last year, Hollywood was flush with international cash and films starring Matthew McConaughey. What will this year hold? Time travel was popular. Prequels were hot. As were guns-for-hire, vampires and movies set on boats. Which of the year's cinematic trends, people, cultural avatars and epiphenomenon are most likely to set the agenda for 2013? Jennifer LawrenceIn X-Men First-Class, Jennifer Lawrence wore the lightly stunned look of someone suffering from an acute case of Newcomer Bends. But then she narrowed her eyes, strung her bow and fired The Hunger Games towards $686m: Lawrence's imperturbability was revealed as the genuine article. The scene in Silver Linings Playbook where she walks into de Niro's lair and has him eating out of her hand in under five minutes may just win her an Oscar at the tender age of 22. If that weren't reason enough for New York magazine to put her at the top her their "Celebrity Brunch League" – the lost of famous people they'd most like to have pancakes with – the editors listed a few more: She complains about her fussy premiere clothes; she crashes into cars while looking for Honey Boo Boo. There was that time that her entire family went to Sleep No More in search of orgies … Jennifer Lawrence cannot be contained by your Movie Star Rules of Decorum; Jennifer Lawrence has too much to share.
We concur. She's like Liz Taylor without the alimony. GirlsJennifer Lawrence wasn't the only ballsy princess of 2012. We also had the flame-haired, cinch-waisted Princess Merida in Pixar's Brave, the studio's first female protagonist; plus Kristin Stewart riding, fighting, and shooting her way through Snow White and the Huntsman, not to mention her swan song for beloved Bella, now a momma grizzly protecting her vampire cub in the last Twilight movie. They all added up to "an interesting new breed of warrior princesses," said the New York Times' AO Scott, "whose ascendance reflects the convergence of commercial calculations and cultural longings." Much of the credit must go to Lionsgate, who released both Breaking Dawn Part 2 and The Hunger Games, thus proving conclusively that young female actresses can 'open' and power a movie move way past the $100 million mark. "Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys," said Gloria Steinem, approvingly. Boys aren't the only ones to play Han Solo. ArcheryThe favored weapon of choice in 2012 was the bow and arrow, thanks to Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games), Merida (Brave) and Hawkeye (The Avengers). The experts could nitpick all they want – "Renner has a break at the wrist, which is putting pressure on his carpal tunnels …" sniffed one archery teacher. We approve of his low-tech cool. Brits in SpandexVery little about Spiderman screams Guildford. Nothing about Batman suggests Wales, Male Voice Choirs, or sheep. And Superman is supposed to hail from the planet Krytpon, not the Isle of Wight. And yet that's where the actors playing those superheroes – Andrew Garfield, Christian Bale, Henry Cavill – hail from. What's the matter with American manhood? "The ugly truth is that American leading men just aren't terribly manly anymore," worried New York's magazine's Vulture blog, attributing the rash of British superhero casting to the "feminization of the American male". Either that or British actors, fed up with playing stuttering kings and fumbling Romeos, are putting in more time at the gym. Take it as a sign of … Hollywood's growing internationalismWith the overseas market now accounting for a staggering 70% of the box office, it came as no surprise that James Cameron was planning to shoot Avatars 2 and 3 with Chinese money. Iron Man 3 is already shooting in China. Wes Anderson is off to Europe for his next movie, following in Woody Allen's footsteps. Mongrel hits Slumdog Millionaire and The Artist are joined this year by Life of Pi, the world's first Canadian-Indian-Taiwanese Oscar contender. As Michel Haznavicious said last year: "I'm not American and I'm not French, actually. I'm a filmmaker." Hollywood is a state of mind. Discuss. The American exoticIf Hollywood grew more international, then America seemed more like a foreign country in 2012. That, at least, was the case with Benh Zeitlin's incandescent debut, Beasts of the Southern Wild, in which a six-year-old's voyage through the "bathtub" of post-Katrina Louisiana took on the mythic aspect of Odysseus wandering the Mediterranean. It recalled another film using American disintegration as the backdrop for myth, 2009's Winter's Bone; together, they suggested a new sub-genre, the American Exotic, shaping flinty myth from forays into the American subcontinent. And to think that magic realism used to be the genre of the developing world. No more. Noted the New York Times' Michael Cieply: Last year Hollywood's top 20 domestic box office performers included just two movies – The Help and Bridesmaids – with realistic stories about American life … In 1992, by contrast, 15 of the 20 best-selling American films were rooted in realistic, if sometimes twisted, American experiences … pressure to generate international sales, which now account for about 70% of Hollywood's worldwide ticket revenue, had pushed the simple portrayal of American lives almost completely off the big studio schedules in May, June and July."
At the cinema at least, America is the foreign country now. ImplosionsThe new explosions, as Slate's Forrest Whickman noticed while surveying the carnage of the Avengers and the Dark Knight Rises. "We appear to be entering a boom in Hollywood implosions," he wrote. When the opening action set-piece of The Avengers ends with the destruction of a remote research facility, the structure goes out not with a bang but more of a cool sucking noise. Meanwhile, in the first trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, Bane is set not on exploding a football stadium full of thousands of people so much as imploding it.
An allegory of Hollywood's imminent collapse-from-within? An echo of 9/11? Or just a cool new way to blow stuff up? Either way, someone should tell Khan Noonien Singh before he gets angry. Playing the bitch"Picasso had his blue period, and this is my bitch period." So said Charlize Theron talking about her roles as the evil stepmom in Snow White and the Huntsman. Playing the bitch is the latest way for Actresses of a Certain Age to outwit (and satirise) Hollywood's cult of youth: whether it be Theron's Queen Ravenna bathing in milk or Julia Roberts's Evil Queen fussing over her complexion in Mirror Mirror. They will soon be joined by Angelina Jolie in the Sleeping-Beauty-remix Maleficent and Rachel Weisz's Wicked Witch Of The East in Oz The Great And Powerful. "Not since Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia DeHavilland and other multi-Oscared legends collectively turned to horror films in order to regain box-office clout in the early 60s have we seen so many Oscar-winning actresses decide bad is good for a career," noted Deadline Hollywood. The difference being that Davis and Crawford were in their 50s when they smudged the mascara. These days, you're playing wicked stepmom once you're past 30 – the new 40, sad to say. As Goldie Hawn famously put it in The First Wives Club: "there are only three ages for women: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy." Self-catching bad guysThe MTV movie blog offered the year's best advice: When you catch your arch-nemesis during the first scene of the film or toward the middle of the second act, you should bet on it being part of his or her evil plan. Bane, Silva, and Loki all used their enemy's predictability to their advantage because no one stopped to think that maybe this was all too easy.
ResurrectionBond did it. Batman did it. Sherlock Holmes did it. In fact Holmes was the first, staging his own death at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, before springing the ultimate comeback. Released back into the pop-cultural biosphere by Jason Bourne in 2002, it became the favored means of outwitting one's enemies in 2012. "What's your hobby?" Javier Bardem asks 007. "Resurrection," replies Bond. Talking of which…. Matthew McConaugheyJust like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, McConaughey's comeback was a form of leathery self-sculpture, fleshy self-abasement, exploiting the same rock-hard abs that had captivated Kate Hudson in countless rom-coms, this time as springboard for his reptilian performance as Dallas, the thong-wearing hip-pumping stud who tutors Channing Tatum in Steven Soderbegh's Magic Mike. "The guy just resonated, and as I was performing him, every day felt like his creation just got more enriched and wider and bigger," said McConaughey. The movie has become the year's most profitable production, spawning a sequel, a stage musical and a hundred doctoral thesis on the Post-Lacanian Dynamics of the Female Gaze. McConaughey's bared torso suggested one more way in which stardom is like sainthood: requiring a mortification of the flesh. That or cheek-bearing chaps. The film-critic-in-chiefAmerica's most cine-literate president since Reagan let Anne Hathaway know she was "the best thing" in the Dark Knight Rises, told Oprah "you have got to see" Beasts of the Southern Wild, found Daniel Day-Lewis "masterful" in the role of Lincoln, and introduced the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird on the USA Network channel, a perfect bit of branding-by-association. "He is the protagonist for middle American aspiration, pathfinder to the straight and narrow and able to suggest a false ease and gloss that go with probity," wrote critic David Thompson of Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch but he could as easily have been talking about America's 44th president. Turns out folks wanted a sequel, too. Preston SturgesUnable to release any new movies since 1959, on account of being dead, Preston Sturges' "11 rules for box-office appeal" remain as potent as ever: • A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
• A leg is better than an arm.
• A bedroom is better than a living room.
• An arrival is better than a departure.
• A birth is better than a death.
• A chase is better than a chat.
• A dog is better than a landscape.
• A kitten is better than a dog.
• A baby is better than a kitten.
• A kiss is better than a baby.
• A pratfall is better than anything.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | New Congress more diverse, with more women and Latinos and fewer white men, but political make-up remains much the same John Boehner was almost certain to be re-elected for another term as speaker of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, despite a rancorous end to the fiscal cliff crisis and fury among some fellow Republicans over his failure to schedule a vote on relief funds for Hurricane Sandy victims. As the 113th Congress was due to be sworn in, it looked likely that Boehner would be unopposed. But he was unlikely to secure the unanimous support of his party he enjoyed last time round: at least one Republican has gone on the record to say he will not vote for him. Some of his House colleagues hold personal grudges, having been removed from committee jobs, and some are simply disenchanted with his performance. But others who had earlier threatened to vote against him, such as the New York congressman Pete King, have come round, in King's case because Boehner relented and scheduled a vote on Sandy aid for Friday. "John will be re-elected Speaker. John is a voice of reason in our conference, despite some of the things I said yesterday," said King on NBC on Thursday morning. The failure of Bohener to schedule a vote on Sandy aid this week drew a furious response from the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. In a 40-minute news conference on Wednesday, Christie railed against the "toxic internal politics" of the House majority. After Christie's comments, Boehner and House majority leader Eric Cantor hurriedly announced there would be two votes on Sandy aid: one on Friday, which will release $9bn for the national flood insurance programme, and another in the first full business day of the new Congress, on 15 January, for a remaining $51bn in the package. Boehner and Cantor met members on Congress from Sandy-affected areas on Wednesday in an attempt to assuage their concerns. "Getting critical aid to the victims of Hurricane Sandy should be the first priority in the new Congress, and that was reaffirmed today with members of the New York and New Jersey delegations," Cantor said after the meeting. The 113th Congress is more diverse than the 112th in terms of race, gender and sexual preferences, but the political make-up is not significantly different. There are a few more Democrats in the Senate and House and fewer Tea Party-backed Republicans in the House, but overall the balance remains much the same. That means the 113th Congress could end up being as unproductive as the 112th, dominated by new showdowns over spending cuts and raising the debt ceiling, eating into time Barack Obama wants for his ambitious programme that includes immigration reform and gun control. The new Congress begins with a rollcall vote for new members followed by a swearing-in ceremony at noon. There will be 82 new members in the House and 12 in the Senate. Among members of Congress departing are Ron Paul, the libertarian who fought for the Republican presidential nomination last year, Dennis Kucinich, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and senator Jim DeMint, the godfather of the Tea Party. The new Congress will see white men as a minority among House Democrats, reflecting the increase in the ranks of women and Latinos. But a more balanced Congress still has a long way to go, with only one black senator, Tim Scott, who replaces DeMint who has opted to stand down without completing his term. The new Congress has a Hindu, a Buddhist – and the return, after a short gap, of a Kennedy, Joseph. Democrat Tammy Baldwin is the first openly gay candidate elected to the Senate. Democrats Tammy Duckworth and Tulsi Gabbard will be the first female combat veterans to serve in Congress.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | John Boehner re-elected as Speaker of the House, narrowly avoiding a second ballot, as 113th Congress is sworn in
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | John Boehner is re-elected as Speaker of the House, narrowly avoiding a second ballot, as the 113th Congress is sworn in
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Police believe thieves who targeted unguarded customs warehouse may have originally imported drug from Morocco As midnight approached, marking the entry of the new year, across the country Spaniards prepared to celebrate in the traditional fashion – by swallowing 12 grapes to the chimes of a clock. But in the southern city of Huelva, a gang of thieves had other plans, eyeing up, as they were, a tonne of confiscated hashish held in a customs warehouse. With no security guards on duty, the local customs headquarters in the centre of Huelva was an easy target for the thieves – who police suspect may belong to the same gang that had originally imported the hashish from nearby Morocco. At exactly 23.59, as Spaniards gathered in front of their television sets to watch the clock chime in midnight, security cameras recorded the men heading for the building's door. Within four minutes they had forced their way through two other doors and carried three 30kg bundles of hashish each to the stolen cars waiting on the street outside. Then they drove off. Police were called by a neighbour and a private security firm was alerted by the building's alarms, but by the time they had arrived there was no trace of the robbers. "It is not right that the building where the drugs were being kept had no guards and insufficient security measures," said the interior minister, Jorge Fernández. Spain's customs agency belongs to the finance ministry, but robberies of hashish from police depots have also become a common occurrence as austerity measures see authorities cut down on night security guards. "It is shameful," Juan Carlos Contreras of the CEP police union told El País newspaper. A similar robbery at a police deposit in Málaga, southern Spain, a year ago saw thieves take 300kg of hashish. On that occasion police took two days to discover that the drugs had been lifted from under their noses.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Follow live updates after the UN gave more details of a "shocking" new finding that 60,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Attack fuels calls for tough new rape laws and better police protection for women across India Five men were formally charged in an Indian court on Thursday with the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in New Delhi, as further cases of sexual violence continued to be reported around the country. The attack on 16 December on the woman has caused outrage across India and led to demands for tough new rape laws and better police protection for women. It has also sparked an unprecedented debate about social attitudes to women. The five, who were not present in court, are accused of assaulting the woman on a bus in New Delhi, leaving her with such severe injuries that she died two weeks later. The case is to be heard in a new fast-track court in south Delhi, inaugurated on Wednesday to deal specifically with crimes against women. Police will ask for the death penalty, a move supported by the victim's father who told reporters "The whole country is demanding that these monsters be hanged. I am with them." Executions are rare in India, where a "rarest of the rare" principle means that most of those who receive a death sentence are jailed for decades instead. A sixth accused is under 18 and is due to be tried separately in a juvenile court. In a sign of the depth of feeling surrounding the case, the bar association at the court said none of its members was willing to represent the accused. The court is expected to assign a defence lawyer for the men. Protests, though less numerous than over recent days and weeks, continued in the Indian capital and elsewhere. Recent incidents include a politician in the north-east of the country reported to have assaulted a woman on Wednesday night and a teenage schoolgirl attacked by at least two men in the southern city of Puducherry, as well as a 17-year-old in Delhi who has accused two cousins of repeated rape. Altamas Kabir, the Indian chief justice, said the accused should be tried swiftly, but cautioned that they needed to be given a fair trial and not be subjected to mob justice. Police officials told the Guardian they were "taking maximum security precautions" to avoid "any mishap" when the accused are finally brought to the court. Hearings are likely to last several weeks, they said. Four other fast-track courts are planned in the capital to hold trials in sexual assault cases, which often get bogged down for years in India's notoriously sluggish court system. The country has a chronic lack of judges. Even if there were no new cases, it would take courts decades to clear the backlog of hundreds of thousands across the country. The new courts will work to provide swift justice "so that the message is sent to all and sundry that these matters are going to be dealt with seriously", Kabir said. Indian states are also introducing new measures to combat sexual violence. In the northern state of Bihar, officials have asked the police to complete investigations in all 500 pending rape cases and charge the accused. Many cases never reach court in a country where there is intense social pressure against families reporting sexual assaults and where women are often blamed for the attacks they suffer. When women do report rapes, police often refuse to file charges and pressure the victims to reach a compromise with their attackers. An investigation by the news magazine Tehelka revealed widespread misogyny among officers. Delhi police on Wednesday started new training sessions for thousands of investigating officers. In a sign that official attitudes towards such behaviour might be changing, authorities in the state of Punjab dismissed two police officers and suspended a third last week over accusations that they delayed investigating a reported gang rape and harassed the victim, who then killed herself. A number of other cases are being re-examined, with a 16-year-old case in the southern state of Kerala involving the alleged gang rape of a teenager over a period of weeks by more than 40 men now to be heard by India's supreme court. Women's activists hope that the rape and killing of the university student last month will mark a turning point in India's attitude toward women. The victim, whose name has not been revealed, was attacked after boarding a bus with a male companion after watching an evening showing of the film Life of Pi. The vehicle was a charter bus that illegally picked up the two passengers, authorities said. The driver was among the six arrested. The pair were attacked for at least an hour as the bus drove through the city, even passing through police checkpoints during the assault. They were eventually dumped naked on the side of the road. The woman was assaulted with an iron bar and suffered severe internal injuries that eventually caused her death on Saturday at a hospital in Singapore. Media reports say police have gathered 30 witnesses, and the charges have been detailed in a document running to more than 1,000 pages. Police also detained the owner of the bus over allegations that he used false documents to obtain permits to run the private bus service. Since the attack, women have held near-daily protests and candlelit vigils in New Delhi, demanding action to stop the daily harassment they face, from groping to more violent attacks. The Indian supreme court was on Thursday also expected to hear a petition demanding that Indian lawmakers facing sexual assault charges be suspended from office. Six state lawmakers are facing rape prosecutions and two national parliamentarians are facing charges of crimes against women that fall short of rape, said Jagdeep S Chhokar, an official with the Association for Democratic Reforms, which tracks political candidates' criminal records. The petition from retired government administrator Promilla Shanker also asks the court to force the national government to fast-track thousands of rape cases across the country.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Attack fuels calls for tough new rape laws and better police protection for women across India Five men were formally charged in an Indian court on Thursday with the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a bus in New Delhi, as further cases of sexual violence continued to be reported around the country. The attack on 16 December has caused outrage across India and led to demands for tough new rape laws and better police protection for women. It has also sparked an unprecedented debate about social attitudes to women. The five men, who were not present in court, are accused of rape, tampering with evidence, kidnapping, murder and other charges that could incur the death penalty. The charge sheet was not released. A sixth accused claims to be under 18 and is due to be tried separately in a juvenile court. The attack, which took place on a bus in New Delhi, left the victim with such severe internal injuries that she died two weeks later. A new fast-track court in south Delhi, inaugurated on Wednesday, will deal specifically with crimes against women. Police will ask for the death penalty, a move supported by the victim's father who told reporters: "The whole country is demanding that these monsters be hanged. I am with them." Executions are rare in India, where a "rarest of the rare" principle means that most of those who receive a death sentence are jailed for decades instead. In a sign of the depth of feeling surrounding the case, the bar association at the court said none of its members was willing to represent the accused. The court is expected to assign a defence lawyer for the men. Protests, though less numerous than over recent days and weeks, continued in the Indian capital and elsewhere. Recent incidents include a politician in north-east India reported to have assaulted a woman on Wednesday night, a teenage schoolgirl attacked by at least two men in the southern city of Puducherry, and a 17-year-old in Delhi who has accused two cousins of repeated rape. Altamas Kabir, the Indian chief justice, said the accused should be tried swiftly, but cautioned that they needed to be given a fair trial and not be subjected to mob justice. Police officials told the Guardian they were "taking maximum security precautions" to avoid "any mishap" when the accused are finally brought to the court. Hearings are likely to last several weeks, they said. Four other fast-track courts are planned in the capital to hold trials in sexual assault cases, which often get bogged down for years in India's notoriously sluggish court system. The country has a chronic lack of judges. Even if there were no new cases, it would take courts decades to clear the backlog of hundreds of thousands across the country. The new courts will work to provide swift justice "so that the message is sent to all and sundry that these matters are going to be dealt with seriously", Kabir said. Indian states are also introducing new measures to combat sexual violence. In the northern state of Bihar, officials have asked the police to complete investigations in all 500 pending rape cases and charge the accused. Many cases never reach court. There is intense social pressure against families reporting sexual assaults and women are often blamed for attacks. When rapes are reported, police often refuse to file charges and pressure the victims to reach a compromise with their attackers. An investigation by the news magazine Tehelka revealed widespread misogyny among officers. Delhi police on Wednesday started new training sessions for thousands of investigating officers. In a sign that official attitudes towards such behaviour might be changing, authorities in the state of Punjab dismissed two police officers and suspended a third last week over accusations that they delayed investigating a reported gang rape and harassed the victim, who then killed herself. A number of other cases are being re-examined, with a 16-year-old case in the southern state of Kerala involving the alleged gang rape of a teenager over a period of weeks by more than 40 men now to be heard by India's supreme court. Women's activists hope that the rape and killing of the university student last month will mark a turning point in India's attitude toward women. The victim, whose name has not been revealed, was attacked after boarding a bus with a male companion after watching an evening showing of the film Life of Pi. The vehicle was a charter bus that illegally picked up the two passengers, authorities said. The driver was among the six arrested. The pair were attacked for at least an hour as the bus drove through the city, even passing through police checkpoints during the assault. They were eventually dumped naked on the side of the road. The woman was assaulted with an iron bar and suffered severe internal injuries that eventually caused her death on Saturday at a hospital in Singapore. Media reports say police have gathered 30 witnesses, and the charges have been detailed in a document running to more than 1,000 pages. Police also detained the owner of the bus over allegations that he used false documents to obtain permits to run the private bus service. Since the attack, women have held near-daily protests and candlelit vigils in New Delhi, demanding action to stop the daily harassment they face, from groping to more violent attacks. The Indian supreme court was on Thursday also expected to hear a petition demanding that Indian lawmakers facing sexual assault charges be suspended from office. Six state lawmakers are facing rape prosecutions and two national parliamentarians are facing charges of crimes against women that fall short of rape, said Jagdeep S Chhokar, an official with the Association for Democratic Reforms, which tracks political candidates' criminal records. The petition from retired government administrator Promilla Shanker also asks the court to force the national government to fast-track thousands of rape cases across the country.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Analysts base estimate on trading in secondary markets and Apple interest in the social networking firm Twitter is preparing to take the company public in 2014, and could already be worth as much as $11bn, according to a report by specialist financial researchers Greencrest. The rough valuation of $11bn is based on trading in secondary markets, where shares unofficially trade hands privately. But a funding round in 2011 valued Twitter at $8bn, after which the value rose to $10bn on secondary markets before Facebook's shambolic IPO pushed the value back down to $9bn. Greencrest analyst Max Wolff said Twitter's value has also been swollen by speculation that Apple is interested in acquiring the company. "Using the secondary market for shares to mark enterprise value is a very difficult and opaque process," he said. "It is a rumour rich and special share class soup. That said, Twitter is up since the Facebook IPO and is now valued at northward of $11bn. This makes sense as growth in users and new monetisation efforts are both yielding fruit and pointing toward a good 2013 for Twitter." Backing up comments made late last year by chairman Jack Dorsey that Twitter would IPO "when we feel the company is ready for that milestone," the research claims Twitter will start preparing for the flotation this year, and has already started firming up its management structure, noted Forbes. Chief financial officer Mike Gupta joined from Zynga last month after Ali Rowghani was moved to chief operating officer, and Newsvine founder Mike Davidson was taken on as vice president of design in October. Twitter had been widely speculated to float this year, but will not have been encouraged into a hasty move by the high-profile, disappointing performances of both Facebook and Zynga. Both have struggled to convince investors that in Facebook's case, the business is ready to make money as consumers shift to mobile, and in Zynga's case that they are capable of producing enough hit games. Facebook's shares are down 26% since the IPO, while Zynga's value has dropped by 75%.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Mainstream recognition, acknowledgement of the genius of M John Harrison and a rekindled fascination with the final frontier - here are my predictions for science fiction this year 2012 has been a year of transition for science fiction and fantasy literature. SF's reputation as home of the Bearded White Male hides a more interesting story. SF is the literature of geeks, and today, geeks run the world. Geek culture isn't infiltrating the mainstream: it is the mainstream. And geeks come in all ages, genders and backgrounds. This year, the Hugo and Nebula award shortlists demonstrated SF's growing diversity, even as the decision of the editorial team at Weird Tales magazine to publish racist screed Save the Pearls demonstrated many of its ongoing challenges. Even in the age of the ebook, word-of-mouth is still what makes a breakout hit, and many of the books to watch in 2013 have been building excitement through 2012. Madeline Ashby's vN: The First Machine Dynasty is the outstanding hard-SF novel of the year and deserves to feature in many award ballots in 2013. Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce has brought the veteran English novelist and World Fantasy award winner to the attention of a growing audience, as have film adaptations in the pipeline for this and his previous novel, The Silent Land. And G Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen stands out as among the most original and challenging books of 2012, and my personal pick for at least one major award in 2013. M John Harrison's masterpiece recognisedWith the novel Empty Space in 2012, M John Harrison concluded his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy begun with Light in 2002 and Nova Swing in 2006. Empty Space and its precursors paint their drama across a canvas reaching from the infinite scale of space-time, down through the quantum universe and into the depths of the human heart. Harrison's masterpiece is the outcome of a decades-long project to fuse the conceptual strength of SF with the human insights of literary fiction. Robert Macfarlane, chair of the Booker prize judging panel in 2013, picked Empty Space as his book of the year recently, and it's unlikely to be the first plaudit as more literary readers discover M John Harrison's remarkable writing. SF writers move to the mainstreamWriters of literary fiction from Michael Chabon to Colson Whitehead have demonstrated their love for SF in recent years, and in 2013 the popularity of the genre will find many of its best writers garner mainstream attention. Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls is tipped as one of the hot books of the year after being purchased by HarperCollins for a high six-figure advance. Beukes's highly acclaimed Moxyland and Zoo City from publisher Angry Robot were some of the most highly acclaimed SF novels of recent years. Fantasist and icon of weird fiction Jeff VanderMeer recently announced a major three-book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux for his Southern Reach trilogy to begin publication in 2014. Moreover, the famed literary imprint are responsible for one of the most notable genre-crossover hits of this year, Mr Penumbras 24 Hour Bookstore by social media star Robin Sloan. Space is SF's new blackOnce upon a time our imagination populated outer space with exotic alien civilisations, and the space race inspired thousands of SF novels through the 60s and 70s. But when exploration revealed nothing but a barren solar system and infinite vacuum, space fell somewhat out of fashion, even within SF. Now, though, the discovery of Earth-like exoplanets, the Curiosity rover touchdown and the media sensation of Felix Baumgartner's space jump are exciting people about space again. Surfing the zeitgeist of space is James Smythe's The Explorer, a thriller of deep-space exploration with overtones of the best 70s space-based SF. Ian Sales' Adrift on the Sea of Rains is one of the most outstanding self-published books of the year, and a homage to the golden age of SF writing and the Apollo space programme. All hail the Kindle serialSerial fiction has been threatening a resurgence for as long as people have been publishing on the internet. But 2013 may be the year it happens – and John Scalzi may be the writer to kick off the revolution. Along with publisher Tor books, Scalzi is planning to serialise the next novel in his hugely popular Old Man's War series via the Amazon Kindle platform. The Human Division begins serialisation this month with new instalments each week, but has already entered the Kindle bestsellers list. The Kindle seems like a natural platform for serial fiction, so expect to see hundreds of other authors and publishers following suit if Scalzi's experiment is a success. American Gods become legendIt's hard to imagine Neil Gaiman becoming any more famous, but we may have to put our imagining hats on as his cult novel American Gods makes its way to our television screens. HBO discovered an audience for epic fantasy with George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones and are hoping to find equal success with Gaiman's urban-fantasy reimagining of contemporary America. Rumours abound that the network have already committed to six seasons of the drama. 2013 also sees the publication of Gaiman's latest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Short of a late Mayan apocalypse, it's hard to see any scenario in which 2013 will not be Neil Gaiman's year.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Star demands tough new laws after 29-year-old photographer killed by passing car in Los Angeles The 29-year-old photographer had just snapped shots of Justin Bieber's white Ferrari when he was struck and killed by a passing car – a death that has spurred renewed debate over the dangers paparazzi can bring on themselves and the celebrities they chase. The accident has prompted some stars including the teen heartthrob himself, who was not in the vehicle on Tuesday, to renew their calls for tougher laws to rein in their pursuers, though previous demands have been stymied by first amendment protections. In a statement, Bieber said his prayers were with the photographer's family. "Hopefully this tragedy will finally inspire meaningful legislation and whatever other necessary steps to protect the lives and safety of celebrities, police officers, innocent public bystanders, and the photographers themselves," Bieber said in the statement released by Island Def Jam Music Group. Authorities have withheld the name of the photographer, who died after being hit by a Toyota Highlander on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, pending notification of relatives. Much of Hollywood was abuzz about the death, including Miley Cyrus, who sent several tweets critical of some of the actions of paparazzi and lamenting that such an accident was "bound to happen". "Hope this paparazzi/JB accident brings on some changes in '13," the actor and singer said on Twitter. "Paparazzi are dangerous! Wasn't Princess Di enough of a wake-up call?!" Paparazzi roaming the streets of southern California have been commonplace for more than a decade as they looked to land exclusive shots that can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars. Industry veterans recalled incidents where paparazzi chasing celebrities have been injured, but they couldn't remember a photographer being killed while working. "Here in the state of California, I'm surprised this hasn't happened before," said Giles Harrison, a celebrity photographer and owner of London Entertainment Group. Harrison is familiar with the backlash against paparazzi. He and another photographer were convicted of misdemeanour false imprisonment and sentenced to jail for boxing in Arnold Schwarzenegger and his family as they sat in their Humvee in 1998. Citing that incident and the death of Princess Diana, the state legislature passed its first anti-paparazzi measure a year later. It created hefty civil penalties that could be paid to stars whose privacy was invaded. Six months ago, a paparazzo was charged with reckless driving in a high-speed pursuit of Bieber and with violating a separate 2010 state law that gave out tougher punishments for those who drive dangerously in pursuit of photos for commercial gain. However, a judge last month dismissed the paparazzi law charges, saying the law was too broad. The judge cited problems with the statute, saying it was aimed at newsgathering activities protected by the first amendment, and lawmakers should have increased penalties for reckless driving rather than target those who photograph celebrities. City prosecutors said they would appeal against the judge's ruling. The law was prompted by the experiences of Jennifer Aniston, who provided details to a lawmaker about being unable to drive away after she was surrounded by paparazzi on Pacific Coast Highway. On Tuesday, a friend of Bieber was behind the wheel of the Ferrari when a California highway patrol officer pulled it over for speeding on Interstate 405, authorities said. "This photographer evidently had been following the white Ferrari" and when it was pulled over after sundown he stopped, parked and crossed the street to snap photos, Los Angeles police detective Charles Walton said. The photographer stood on a low freeway railing to take photographs of the traffic over a chain-link fence, authorities said. "The CHP officer told him numerous times that it wasn't safe for him to be there and to return to his vehicle," Walton said. There were no pavements or pedestrian crossings along the street where the photographer had parked, so the driver of the car that struck him had no reason to expect a pedestrian, Walton said of the accident.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Attack fuels calls for tough new rape laws and better police protection for women across India Indian police are set to file rape and murder charges against a group of men accused of sexually assaulting a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in New Delhi, as further cases of sexual violence continued to be reported around the country. The attack on 16 December on the woman, who later died of her injuries, has caused outrage across India and led to demands for tough new rape laws and better police protection for women. It has also sparked an unprecedented debate about social attitudes to women. Protests, though less numerous than over recent days and weeks, continued on Thursday in the Indian capital and elsewhere. Recent incidents include a politician in the north-east of the country reported to have assaulted a woman on Wednesday night and a teenage schoolgirl attacked by at least two men in the southern city of Puducherry, as well as a 17-year-old in Delhi who has accused two cousins of repeated rape. Five men aged between 18 and 35 who were detained by police two days after the attack were expected to be charged in a new fast-track court in south Delhi, inaugurated on Wednesday to deal specifically with crimes against women. Police will ask for the death penalty in the case. Executions are rare in India, where a "rarest of the rare" principle means that most of those who receive a death sentence are jailed for decades instead. A sixth alleged attacker has said he is a juvenile and thus cannot, under Indian law, be charged with the other accused. Authorities were conducting medical tests on him to determine his true age. Altamas Kabir, the Indian chief justice, said the accused should be tried swiftly, but cautioned that they needed to be given a fair trial and not be subjected to mob justice. Police officials told the Guardian they were "taking maximum security precautions" to avoid "any mishap" when the accused are finally brought to the court. Hearings are likely to last several weeks, they said. Four other fast-track courts are planned in the capital to hold trials in sexual assault cases, which often get bogged down for years in India's notoriously sluggish court system. The country has a chronic lack of judges. Even if there were no new cases, it would take courts decades to clear the backlog of hundreds of thousands across the country. The new courts will work to provide swift justice "so that the message is sent to all and sundry that these matters are going to be dealt with seriously", Kabir said. Indian states are also introducing new measures to combat sexual violence. In the northern state of Bihar, officials have asked the police to complete investigations in all 500 pending rape cases and charge the accused. Many cases never reach court in a country where there is intense social pressure against families reporting sexual assaults and where women are often blamed for the attacks they suffer. When women do report rapes, police often refuse to file charges and pressure the victims to reach a compromise with their attackers. An investigation by the news magazine Tehelka revealed widespread misogyny among officers. Delhi police on Wednesday started new training sessions for thousands of investigating officers. In a sign that official attitudes towards such behaviour might be changing, authorities in the state of Punjab dismissed two police officers and suspended a third last week over accusations that they delayed investigating a reported gang rape and harassed the victim, who then killed herself. A number of other cases are being re-examined, with a 16-year-old case in the southern state of Kerala involving the alleged gang rape of a teenager over a period of weeks by more than 40 men now to be heard by India's supreme court. Women's activists hope that the rape and killing of the university student last month will mark a turning point in India's attitude toward women. The victim, whose name has not been revealed, was attacked after boarding a bus with a male companion after watching an evening showing of the film Life of Pi. The vehicle was a charter bus that illegally picked up the two passengers, authorities said. The driver was among the six arrested. The pair were attacked for at least an hour as the bus drove through the city, even passing through police checkpoints during the assault. They were eventually dumped naked on the side of the road. The woman, who was assaulted with an iron bar, suffered severe internal injuries that eventually caused her death on Saturday at a hospital in Singapore. Media reports say police have gathered 30 witnesses, and the charges have been detailed in a document running to more than 1,000 pages. Police also detained the owner of the bus over allegations that he used false documents to obtain permits to run the private bus service. The Bar Association said its lawyers would not defend the six suspects because of the nature of the crime, but the court is expected to appoint attorneys to defend them. Since the attack, women have held near-daily protests and candlelit vigils in New Delhi, demanding action to stop the daily harassment they face, from groping to more violent attacks. The Indian supreme court was on Thursday also expected to hear a petition demanding that Indian lawmakers facing sexual assault charges be suspended from office. Six state lawmakers are facing rape prosecutions and two national parliamentarians are facing charges of crimes against women that fall short of rape, said Jagdeep S Chhokar, an official with the Association for Democratic Reforms, which tracks political candidates' criminal records. The petition from retired government administrator Promilla Shanker also asks the court to force the national government to fast-track thousands of rape cases across the country.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Newtown shooting survivors to start new term at a neighbouring school police have called the 'safest' in the US The children who escaped last month's shootings at a Connecticut elementary school will be returning to classes in a neighbouring town in a refurbished school renamed after their old one. The Newtown superintendent of schools, Janet Robinson, announced that the students' new school, the former Chalk Hill Middle School in Monroe, had been renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School. She said the Sandy Hook staff made that decision. "That's who they are. They're the Sandy Hook family," Robinson said after a news conference at a park in Monroe a few miles from the school, which will open for classes on Thursday morning. An open house was held for parents and students on Wednesday. Robinson added that renaming the Chalk Hill school will allow staff and students to keep "their identity and a comfort level". The school where the shootings occurred remains closed and guarded by police. Newtown officials haven't decided yet on the building's future. It's been nearly three weeks since the 14 December massacre, when gunman Adam Lanza killed 20 students and six teachers. Lanza also killed his mother at the home they shared in Newtown before the school shootings, which ended when Lanza fatally shot himself as police arrived. Police have not yet released any details about a motive. Police officers on Wednesday were on guard outside the Monroe school, which is about seven miles from the old school, and told reporters to stay away. Asked about the level of security at the new school, Monroe police Lieutenant Keith White said, "I think right now it has to be the safest school in America." Newtown police chief Michael Kehoe declined to answer questions on Wednesday about the investigation. Teachers attended staff meetings at the new school on Wednesday morning and were visited by the Connecticut state governor, Dannel P Malloy, White said. Robinson said Chalk Hill School had been transformed into a "cheerful" place for the surviving students to resume normal school routines. She said mental health counsellors continued to be available for anyone who needs them. "They're so excited to see the teachers," Robinson said about the open house attendees. Signs welcoming the Sandy Hook students to their new school were posted along the road leading to the school in a rural, mostly residential neighborhood. One said "Welcome Sandy Hook Elementary Kids," while another added "You are in our prayers." Donna Page, a retired Sandy Hook principal, will lead the new school. Teams of workers, many of them volunteers, prepared the Chalk Hill school with fresh paint and new furniture and even raised bathroom floors so the smaller elementary school students could reach the toilets. The students' desks, backpacks and other belongings that were left behind following the shooting were taken to the new school to make them feel at home. Counsellors say it's important for children to get back to a normal routine and for teachers and parents to offer sensitive reassurances. When classes start, Robinson said teachers will try to make it as normal a school day as possible for the children. "We want to get back to teaching and learning," she said. "We will obviously take time out from the academics for any conversations that need to take place, and there will be a lot of support there. All in all, we want the kids to reconnect with their friends and classroom teachers, and I think that's going to be the healthiest thing."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Follow how the day unfolded after the UN gave more details of a "shocking" new finding that 60,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The gang rape and murder of a young woman last month has sparked furious protests in India – and given voice to an emerging political class. It has also highlighted the urban sprawl and violence that lie behind the country's booming economy Mahipalpur is not a place you will find on many tourist guides to India. Once a village, now a cluster of cheap hotels, roadside restaurants and bus stops around a major road junction on the outskirts of Delhi, it is a place many pass by but few seek out. The huge, new billion-dollar international airport terminal lies a mile or so away, across construction sites, wasteland and rubbish tips, obscured now by a thick winter fog, a mixture of smoke from wood fires and pollution. Concrete pillars of a recently constructed metro link, which worked for a few months but has been out of commission for many more, loom. Tens of thousands of people pass Mahipalpur every day. Few stop. It was here, in the dirt beside a ramp leading to the flyover carrying an eight-lane highway, at 10.20pm on 16 December, that a bus briefly stopped and a semi-conscious woman and her male companion were dumped, naked and badly injured, on the ground. This being India, a crowd quickly gathered. Passing cars slowed. After 40 minutes, someone called the police, who fetched sheets from one of the nearby hotels to cover the couple and took them to hospital. Arrive at almost any of the new airports being built across India outside its major cities, and head to the heritage sites or the better, long-established hotels, and you will pass through a Mahipalpur. These are the grey zones around India's rapidly expanding urban centres. Little happens here that makes it into the local newspapers, let alone the western press. Yet India's myriad Mahipalpurs may hold the key to the country's future. In the three weeks since the gang rape and murder of the as-yet-unnamed 23-year-old woman by six men on a moving bus in south Delhi, there has been a great deal of comment in the western media about the nature of modern India. Many appear surprised to have suddenly discovered something that appears to contradict the "booming India" story. When Boris Johnson visited India last year, he described two sights on his journey into Delhi from the airport that, for him, encapsulated the country. One was a Jaguar car, symbol of India's economic success, overseas clout and potential as a market. The second was an elephant being washed by its mahout, representing traditional, exotic India, unchanged and, happily, unchangeable. This week it is difficult to imagine anyone being quite so blithely inattentive to the complex realities of this vast and varied nation. One of the first stories I covered on my return to India three years ago was the violence between Maoist guerrillas, Communist party thugs and various other factions in the desperately poor district of West Midnapore, in the vast state of West Bengal. This appeared to be old India at its worst, a combination of grinding poverty and brutal killings. I interviewed a woman whose husband had just been executed by Maoist guerillas who accused him of being a spy for the police. Nearby, other villagers complained of militia, run by the local government, who burned homes down and raped, apparently at will. Although the catalyst for the wave of violence in West Midnapore was imminent state elections, the killings had started years earlier, when a major steel project was announced in the area. Such a project would have created jobs, wealth – and much opportunity for whoever controlled the area to indulge in immensely profitable racketeering. It was rooted not in the lack of change – but in the coming of change. A few months later, I reported a particularly egregious "honour killing", one of the hundreds, if not thousands, that take place each year in India. The male teenage relatives of a young woman had killed her and her supposed lover with an unlicensed "country" pistol before fleeing. They lived not in a remote village but in the north-west of Delhi. All of those involved in the murders lived nonetheless on frontiers: between Wazirpur, their working-class neighbourhood, and Ashok Vihar, the adjacent upmarket suburb; between the increasingly cosmopolitan Indian capital and its deeply conservative hinterland; between the crushing poverty of their parents' childhoods and the relative wealth of their own. In 2011, an investigation into a hitman who bragged of killing a hundred or more people took me to a small village an hour from Delhi, to Ghaziabad, a rough and violent town that is now part of the Indian capital's urban sprawl, and to Gurgaon, another satellite city just a 10-minute drive from Mahipalpur. Jaggu Pehelwan had grown up in the village, was part of a gang based in Ghaziabad and found most of his targets and clients in Gurgaon, among businessman and criminals based among the call centres, multinational corporations, five-star hotels and luxury malls. It was the opportunity, the wealth, the corruption and the chaos of new India that had made Pehlawan, who otherwise would have been a small-time thug in his village, what he was. Pehlewan existed in a world of Mahipalpurs – cheap hotels, cheap restaurants, parties fuelled by locally made foreign liquor and escorts. He had taken holidays to Goa and Kashmir, the two classic middle-class Indian destinations, and had bought a big four-wheel drive, a classic Indian middle-class acquisition that he drove, for fun, on the new expressways near his village homes. One of these leads to Noida and the new Formula One circuit, a $400m project. Beyond the half-built apartment blocks around the track are the villages of farmers who had once tilled the ground beneath the Tarmac. Many have received huge sums as compensation for their land. Others have not. This too has generated tension. All these places – Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Noida, even Mahipalpur – will grow in the coming years. This urban sprawl will not just be limited to Delhi and its environs, where around 17 million people already live. Most experts say that further urbanisation is necessary for India's economic growth to continue; the new middle classes will want apartments and parks and roads and schools. There is a huge youth bulge pushing through. Some 290 million people were living in cities in India in 2001, a figure that rose to 340 million in 2008 and is set to reach 590 million, around 40% of the population, by 2030. By that year, business consultant McKinsey and Co predicts, there will be 68 Indian cities of more than a million people, 13 with more than 4 million and six megacities with populations of 10 million or more. More than 30 million people will live in Mumbai and 26 million in Delhi. By then the dominant feature of modern India may well not be the rural village or the picturesque forts and saris of the tourist brochures but the nondescript, semi-finished, ragged-edged, semi-urban, semi-rural world that is simultaneously neither and both of them. The six suspected rapists certainly inhabited this "inbetween" world. All grew up in poor, socially conservative rural communities in some of the most backward, violent parts of the country and frequently returned to their villages. Ram Singh, the 35-year-old bus driver who is alleged to be the ringleader, and his younger brother Mukesh, came from Karauli in Rajasthan. The district may be only a few hours drive from the Taj Mahal but honour killings, banditry and violence between castes, the tenacious millennia-old social hierarchy, are endemic there. Another of the suspects came from southern Bihar, as poor and lawless a spot as anywhere in India. A fourth was from Basti, a small town near the border with Nepal, a bad place in a state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), that has socio-economic indicators worse than many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Bihar and UP, along with the more prosperous Haryana and Punjab, are states in which the killing of female foetuses and girls is common practice. But all were living in Delhi, in an unregistered semi-legal squatters' "colony" or "camp" in the south of the city that itself is a halfway house between village and urban life. In Ravi Dass colony, named after a 15th-century saint, children return from classes in fashion design or medicine at local colleges to mothers cooking on open wood-fired clay stoves. It too is a zone of transition, barely policed, where, as they would do in a village, neighbours enforce order and the authorities are rarely seen. "We are good people," one inhabitant said this weekend. There was little "eve-teasing" – as sexual harrassment is often euphemistically called in India – because fathers would unite to ensure anyone troubling their daughters stopped. But beyond the colony, there were no such constraints. Out on the streets of Delhi, there were no neighbours, no angry fathers a few yards away, and, as with most Indian cities, only rare, inefficient and often corrupt police. The victim too lived on the fringes of Delhi: in Dwarka, a sprawl of flats and construction sites developed in phases since the mid-1960s to the south-west of the city. It too is a place of constant change as it expands into the semi-rural hinterland. Her father, from a small provincial town, had got a job as a loader at Delhi airport. His daughter's recent qualification as a physiotherapist meant her family was thus well on the way to fulfilling its aspirations of respectability, relative economic comfort and broader opportunity for the next generation. On the evening of the assault, she and her friend were returning from a cinema in Saket, one of two multiplexes at a well-known and extremely popular modern shopping mall. The moment they climbed into the unlicensed private bus driven by their attackers the good and the bad elements of India's ongoing transformation collided. In India this week the protests are now beginning to die away and the media coverage is diminishing. The charge sheet against the six accused – 1,000 pages long – will be entered formally in court tomorrow. Police have said they will seek a death sentence. Some legislation will be passed. There will be fast-track courts set up, harsher penalties for rape introduced and a few other measures. The issue will not be forgotten but the rapes that currently appear on the front of local newspapers will slide inexorably towards less-prominent pages. The deeper question is which part of India's transition wins in the long run; is Mahipalpur a zone of chaos and lawlessness where the badly injured are dumped, or something better? If there is hope it is because, beyond the scale of violence to women in India and a myriad other social problems, something else has been revealed: a vast gulf between many in this huge country and the people who rule them, at least at a national level. And importantly, recent weeks have seen the mobilisation of a new political force. For decades, politics in India has involved deference, hierarchy and handouts, or archaic ideologies unchanged since the cold war. It is likely that elderly men dependent on hundreds of thousands of carefully marshalled votes in conservative rural areas will hold on to power for some time to come. But the largely unplanned, spontaneous protests, and the media attention they have commanded, have demonstrated something new: the existence of large numbers of young, educated, urban potential voters who will no longer tolerate a largely unaccountable, unresponsive political elite and bureaucracy incapable of performing the most fundamental tasks. As the cities grow so, one can reasonably hope that such voices will grow more numerous. Brinda Karat, a Communist member of parliament, said last week that "a turning point had been reached" now that young women had "sensed and seen" the power that they could have when united. This may be premature but yesterday protesters at the dwindling demonstrations across Delhi were adamant that change would indeed come. Ayesha Bhatt, a 22-year-old student who had travelled to Delhi from the city of Moradabad, five hours to the north, to light a candle at the site where the victims of the attack mounted the bus, said it was "impossible to imagine that the country will sit back and say chalta hai [all is going to be fine]." "We are not a chalta hai generation," she said. But down at Mahipalpur in the winter fog, snarling, honking traffic crawled past the roadside wasteland where the victim and her friend had been dumped. Commuters queued for crowded, unlicenced buses. A beggar tapped on the window of a stationary Mercedes. A plane roared overhead. Two women argued over a spilled basket of bruised and blackened bananas. A weak string of streetlights flickered into life, sent a brief wavering light into the gloom and then went out.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Executive chairman to travel to the country on a private mission led by former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson Google's executive chairman is preparing to travel to one of the last frontiers of cyberspace: North Korea. Eric Schmidt will travel to the country on a private, humanitarian mission led by former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson as early as this month. The trip would be the first by a top executive from US-based Google, the world's largest internet search provider, to a country considered to have the most restrictive internet policies in the world. North Korea is in the midst of what leader Kim Jong-un called a modern-day industrial revolution in a New Year's Day speech. He is pushing science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished country, aiming for computers in every school and digitised machinery in every factory. However, giving citizens open access to the internet has not been part of North Korea's strategy. While some North Koreans can access a domestic intranet service, very few have clearance to freely surf the web. It remains highly unlikely Google will push to launch a business venture in the country, according to Victor Cha, a former senior Asia specialist in the Bush administration. "Perhaps the most intriguing part of this trip is simply the idea of it," said Cha, an analyst with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington. Kim Jong-un "clearly has a penchant for the modern accoutrements of life", he said. "If Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang, it could be a very interesting development." It was not immediately clear whom Schmidt and Richardson expect to meet in North Korea, a country that does not have diplomatic relations with the US. North Korea has almost no business with companies in the US, which has banned the import of North Korean-made goods. Schmidt, however, has been a vocal advocate of providing people around the world with internet access and technology.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Venezuela's vice-president seeks to reassure compatriots following Chávez's emergency surgery three weeks ago Venezuela's vice-president, Nicolás Maduro, has told the country to ignore "enemy" rumours of president Hugo Chávez's imminent demise. Maduro has been at Chávez's bedside in a Cuban hospital but was due to fly home to Caracas on Wednesday. He returns to a country gripped by uncertainty about the wellbeing of a leader who has dominated the political landscape since 1999 but has not been seen in public since he was rushed to Havana for emergency cancer surgery three weeks ago. Several New Year festivities were cancelled, masses have been arranged for supporters to pray for Chávez's recovery and the government has urged Venezuela to focus on serenity and unity. What many want, however, is definitive news on whether the president will be healthy enough to be sworn in to his fourth term in office on 10 January. On Tuesday night, Maduro, in a pre-recorded interview with regional broadcaster Telesur, said Chávez was "conscious of how delicate his recovery was" and that the president had urged him to keep the Venezuelan people informed "regardless of how hard the truth might be at times". Maduro said: "He's totally conscious of the complexity of his post-operative state and he expressly asked us … to keep the nation informed always, always with the truth, as hard as it may be in certain circumstances." Maduro said in a televised address on Monday that Chávez had suffered new complications from a respiratory infection and described the leader's health as delicate. He said Chávez had held his hand with great vigour and that his face was filled with "gigantic strength". "At times, there have been slight improvements, at times there have been stationary situations," Maduro said, adding that he had faith that Chávez would emerge sooner rather than later from "the situation he is confronting". Rámon Guillermo Aveledo, secretary of the MUD, a coalition of opposition parties, demanded the government give specific details about Chávez's health. Aveledo blamed the secrecy surrounding the president's health for the rumours that flooded social network sites for the past two days. "We reiterate our demand that the current government give an objective and comprehensive explanation of the president's current health situation, his actual state and his medical prognosis," Aveledo said yesterday. He also accused the government of manipulating the information surrounding Chávez's health in the run-up to the regional elections, where the president's supporters captured 20 of the 23 governor posts. "The contrast is obvious between maintaining the public's interest in this theme in the days prior to the governors' elections and the marked silence of these past days," Aveledo added. "If the president-elect is unable to be sworn into office because of reasons related to his health we must abide by what the constitution says with regard to temporary absences." The news of Chávez's deteriorating health and cancelled events prompted a flurry of tweets and messages on social networks that claimed Chávez was on life support and his days were numbered. The wave of rumours reached such intensity that Chávez's son-in-law and the minister of science and technology, Jorge Arreaza, tweeted from Havana asking Venezuelans to ignore the ill-intentioned rumours. In Tuesday's interview, Maduro, who was named by Chávez as his preferred political heir should he become too ill to govern, described the rumours as the result of "the hatred of the enemies of Venezuela"." He said: "What is behind these lies? Evil and hatred. Rightwing journalists sickened with hatred. They have no limits. They don't know how to respect the feelings of [the president's] daughters. They are capable of mockery and, in doing so, they reveal their sickened souls." As the oil-rich nation contemplated the possibility that Chávez might be unable to assume power next week, some rumours claimed Chávez's closest allies were divided and succession might not be smooth. According to the constitution, a snap election must be called within 30 days if the president should be unable to govern at the time of inauguration. Chávez previously asked the Venezuelan people to vote for Maduro in that eventuality, referring to him as the man capable of moving his self-styled socialist revolution forward. Following Maduro's interview, Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly, who some regard as second in line to power, tweeted that no one "in the Venezuelan opposition, nor their bosses abroad could attempt against the unwavering will of the revolutionary unity". However, Cabello, a former paratrooper who accompanied Chávez in his 1992 coup, has stated that Chávez is the country's only leader and the constitution allows for him to be sworn in at a later date. He said the will of more than 8 million people who voted Chávez into office in last October's election could not be ignored.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | With Boehner unable to control House's Tea Party Republicans, Obama warns next debate will have 'catastrophic' consequences The White House and congressional Republicans were gearing up for even bigger economic showdowns after a messy compromise on the fiscal cliff crisis was finally agreed by the House of Representatives The fiscal cliff deal, passed after days of disarray that highlighted the extent of the partisan divide in Washington, raised taxes on the wealthiest but postponed for two months a decision about $110bn in spending cuts to the federal budget. The fudge is almost certain to put the White House and Congress at loggerheads again next month or in early March. As well as the looming battle over spending cuts, the two sides also face a stand-off over raising the federal debt ceiling. President Barack Obama, who arrived back in Hawaii on Wednesday to resume his interrupted holiday, hailed the fiscal cliff deal as the fulfillment of an election promise to raise taxes on the rich. But he spent little time savouring the moment, instead devoting much of his statement on the congressional vote to the battles ahead.
Expressing his frustration with Republicans in Congress, he warned that failure to raise the debt ceiling would be dire. "The consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic, far worse than the impact of a fiscal cliff," he said. The new 113rd Congress is scheduled to begin work on Thursday, but the November election left its make-up virtually unchanged from its predecessor. The Republicans retain a majority in the House and the Democrats a majority in the Senate. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, is pessimistic, viewing the fiscal cliff showdown as unnecessary and anticipating future collisions. "This whole thing is trumped up," Sabato said. "We've known about the fiscal cliff for 17 months. There's no excuse for what's happened. It's pitiful, and it's going to happen again." He said the two sides remained polarised. "The parties don't speak the same language. It's very clear that the Republican caucus does not like President Obama personally. There's no deference to an election victory. We always used to have that. You got a bit of a honeymoon and a bit of a mandate when you won an election. And now there's nothing." Tuesday proved to be an especially bad day for the Republicans. The vote in the House exposed the depth of divisions not only between Democrats and Republicans but within the Republican party. In the House, the bill was passed by 257 to 167, but the breakdown on party lines showed 151 Republicans voting against the measure, with only 85 Republicans in favour of it.
The divide cut through even the party leadership in the House, with speaker John Boehner voting for it, and the majority leader Eric Cantor and the whip Kevin McCarthy, both more conservative figures than Boehner, voting against. Republicans expressed anger with Cantor and McCarthy for earlier calling on colleagues to rally behind Boehner in voting for the bill and then doing the opposite themselves. Many Republicans, especially those backed by the Tea party, want to remain ideologically pure, able to go back to their districts saying they had not voted for tax increases. Boehner's inability to control his own caucus, in particular the Tea party bloc, is one of the reasons politics in Washington has become so divisive. He is up for re-election for speaker soon after the new Congress convenes at noon Thursday, but so far, there is no suggestion that Cantor or any other Republican plans to mount a challenge. Illustrating the extent to which personal relations have broken down, the Politico website reported a confrontation in the midst of the fiscal cliff negotiations last Friday in which Boehner told the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid: "Go fuck yourself." Boehner is reported to have made the comment in the lobby after Reid had publicly said he was more interested in securing re-election as speaker than reaching a deal. The House passed the bill only after a day of rancorous deliberations, despite the Senate having voted overwhelmingly in favour of it, by 89 votes to eight, in the early hours of the morning. The bill restricts tax rises to individuals earning $400,000 or more a year and households earning $450,000 or more. Estate tax also rises, to 40% from 35%, but inheritances below $5m are exempted from the increase. Benefits for the unemployed are extended for another year. AP calculates that for those earning between $500,000 to $1 million a year it will mean an average tax increase of $14,812 and for those earning more than $1 million, $170,341. Obama, in his statement from the White House, recalled that in the last showdown over the debt ceiling in 2011, the federal government almost shut down. He said that he did not want to repeat that situation and would leave the latest debt ceiling debate to Congress rather than becoming directly involved. In the end, it is difficult to see how the White House can remain aloof, given the consequences of the US being unable to meet its debt obligations. The president expressed concern that repeated battles with Congress over the economy will eat into time that he hoped to use to push through his second-term agenda. "We can settle this debate, or at the very least, not allow it to be so all-consuming all the time that it stops us from meeting a host of other challenges that we face: creating jobs, boosting incomes, fixing our infrastructure, fixing our immigration system, protecting our planet from the harmful effects of climate change, boosting domestic energy production, protecting our kids from the horrors of gun violence," the president said.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | US secretary of state was forced to cancel trips to north Africa and Middle East, but is expected to make full recovery US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has been released from a New York hospital where she was treated for a blood clot in her head. Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines says her doctors advised her that she has been making progress on all fronts and are confident she will make a full recovery. He says Clinton is appreciative of the excellent care she received at the hospital and is eager to get back to work. A date for her return to the state department has not been set. The blood clot was discovered on Sunday during a follow-up examination to a concussion Clinton suffered in mid-December. Clinton was admitted to the hospital that night. Clinton suffered the concussion after falling at home while recuperating from a stomach virus. She was unable to attend a congressional hearing into the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi, and cancelled trips to north Africa and the Middle East. Her absence from sessions concerning the Benghazi attack provoked some Republican commentators to question the veracity of her condition. Clinton's supporters, meanwhile, have been left wondering whether Clinton would be preparing to run for president in 2016, as expected. When asked about her plans for post-2012 election life in late 2011, she said: "I think after 20 years, and it will be 20 years, of being on the highwire of American politics and all of the challenges that come with that, it would probably be a good idea to just find out how tired I am." Clinton is set to step down as a secretary of state early this year. Barack Obama nominated senator John Kerry, a former presidential nominee and current chair of the Senate's foreign relations committee, as her replacement. Clinton told the New York Daily News in 2007 that she suffered from a blood clot in her right leg in 1998.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Mullah Nazir from the Wazir tribe killed when missiles hit house near Wana, South Waziristan A top Taliban leader who quarrelled with other militant factions over his refusal to attack the Pakistani government was killed by a US unmanned drone in the early hours of Thursday, security officials have claimed. Mullah Nazir was reportedly holding a meeting at the time of the missile strike with other senior leaders of his group in a building in Birmil in South Waziristan, one of the troubled tribal regions where the Taliban, al-Qaida and other militant groups have based themselves. The first reported drone strike of 2013 was followed by another attack in North Waziristan at around 9am on Thursday morning. That strike reportedly involved four separate missile strikes on a vehicle in Mubarakshahi, a village near Miran Shah. Because journalists are usually prevented by militants from visiting places hit by drones the exact details of what happened and who was killed in such attacks are often extremely hard to verify. Residents and an intelligence official in South Waziristan who spoke to a local journalist said the total number of people killed in the first attack was either six or ten. The intelligence source said all the men killed were "top leaders" of the Mullah Nazir group, the leading militant group in South Waziristan. Reuters, citing a number of different security sources, reported Nazir's deputy commander, Ratta Khan, was also killed, along with eight others. Neither the Pakistani government nor the Taliban had made an official statement by lunchtime on Thursday. Critics of Pakistan's policies in Waziristan say Nazir had long enjoyed some degree of official protection because he promised not to attack soldiers or government facilities. Under an agreement with other leading militant groups struck in early 2012, Nazir instead focused his efforts on attacks inside Afghanistan against Nato and Afghan government forces. Some locals have credited the agreement with an upsurge in business and development activity in his area of control in South Waziristan. But the deal angered other factions, not least the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan – the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) – which continues to mount bloody attacks against the government. In November he was wounded in a suicide attack on his vehicle as he travelled through the bazaar in the town of Wana. No group claimed responsibility although some have accused TTP members of the Mehsud tribe who had been displaced from their own areas by attacks from the Pakistani military. Nazir had tried to order the Mehsud people out of his area shortly before the attack by a teenage bomber on a motorbike. Imtiaz Gul, a leading security analyst, said that despite the non-aggression deal the Pakistani state was likely to privately welcome his demise because he had long sheltered government enemies. "Both the US and Pakistan will be happy because they now have one less enemy," he said. "Although he was in an undeclared peace deal with the government, he was also subverting the stated goals of that agreement by providing support and shelter to al-Qaida people whose leaders have pleaded with the rank and file of the Pakistani army to rebel against the state." In the summer he became the second leading militant in the tribal areas to ban the work of polio vaccinators in his area of control until strikes by US drones came to an end. He claimed the health workers were using their work as cover to collect intelligence used by the CIA to target militants with drones. Drone strikes are enormously unpopular in Pakistan as many people believe they not only violate Pakistani sovereignty but also kill large numbers of civilians. The US, however, believes it operates its drone campaign with some degree of official consent from the Pakistani government, even though the country's foreign ministry often lodges a diplomatic complaint after each strike. US officials also believe the attacks are extremely accurate and rarely kill civilians, although it never provides detailed evidence to back up those claims as officials are legally barred from talking publicly about a CIA programme that although conducted in the open is still technically clandestine.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Mullah Nazir from the Wazir tribe killed when missiles hit house near Wana, south Waziristan A US drone strike has killed a Taliban commander, his deputy and eight others in northern Pakistan, intelligence sources and tribal leaders have said. Maulvi Nazir Wazir, also known as Mullah Nazir, an important commander from the Wazir tribe, was killed on Wednesday night when missiles struck a house in Angoor Adda, near the capital of Wana, south Waziristan. His death was confirmed by seven intelligence sources and two residents from his tribe. His deputy, Ratta Khan, was also killed, three sources said. Nazir favoured attacking American forces in Afghanistan rather than Pakistani soldiers in Pakistan, a position that put him at odds with some other Pakistan Taliban commanders. Nazir was wounded in a bombing in November, widely believed to be as a result of his rivalries with other Taliban commanders. Shortly after the bombing, his Wazir tribe told the Mehsud tribe, related to Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, to leave the area. The Pakistani army has clawed back territory from the Taliban since launching a military offensive in 2009. Intensified drone strikes have also killed many senior Taliban leaders, including Mehsud's predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, in 2009. The number of drone strikes have increased since Barack Obama took office. There were only five in 2007, peaking at 117 in 2010, then down to 46 last year. Most of the strikes hit militants although civilians have also been killed. Rights groups say that some residents are so afraid of the strikes they don't want to leave their homes. Data collected from news reports by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism shows that between 2,600 and 3,404 Pakistanis have been killed by drones, of which 473 to 889 were reported to be civilians. It is difficult to verify civilian casualties because Taliban fighters often seal off the sites of drone strikes immediately.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Newtown shooting survivors to start new term at a neighbouring school police have called the 'safest' in the US The children who escaped last month's shootings at a Connecticut elementary school will be returning to classes in a neighbouring town in a refurbished school renamed after their old one. The Newtown superintendent of schools, Janet Robinson, announced that the students' new school, the former Chalk Hill Middle School in Monroe, had been renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School. She said the Sandy Hook staff made that decision. "That's who they are. They're the Sandy Hook family," Robinson said after a news conference at a park in Monroe a few miles from the school, which will open for classes on Thursday morning. An open house was held for parents and students on Wednesday. Robinson added that renaming the Chalk Hill school will allow staff and students to keep "their identity and a comfort level". The school where the shootings occurred remains closed and guarded by police. Newtown officials haven't decided yet on the building's future. It's been nearly three weeks since the 14 December massacre, when gunman Adam Lanza killed 20 students and six teachers. Lanza also killed his mother at the home they shared in Newtown before the school shootings, which ended when Lanza fatally shot himself as police arrived. Police have not yet released any details about a motive. Police officers on Wednesday were on guard outside the Monroe school, which is about seven miles from the old school, and told reporters to stay away. Asked about the level of security at the new school, Monroe police Lieutenant Keith White said, "I think right now it has to be the safest school in America." Newtown police chief Michael Kehoe declined to answer questions on Wednesday about the investigation. Teachers attended staff meetings at the new school on Wednesday morning and were visited by the Connecticut state governor, Dannel P Malloy, White said. Robinson said Chalk Hill School had been transformed into a "cheerful" place for the surviving students to resume normal school routines. She said mental health counsellors continued to be available for anyone who needs them. "They're so excited to see the teachers," Robinson said about the open house attendees. Signs welcoming the Sandy Hook students to their new school were posted along the road leading to the school in a rural, mostly residential neighborhood. One said "Welcome Sandy Hook Elementary Kids," while another added "You are in our prayers." Donna Page, a retired Sandy Hook principal, will lead the new school. Teams of workers, many of them volunteers, prepared the Chalk Hill school with fresh paint and new furniture and even raised bathroom floors so the smaller elementary school students could reach the toilets. The students' desks, backpacks and other belongings that were left behind following the shooting were taken to the new school to make them feel at home. Counsellors say it's important for children to get back to a normal routine and for teachers and parents to offer sensitive reassurances. When classes start, Robinson said teachers will try to make it as normal a school day as possible for the children. "We want to get back to teaching and learning," she said. "We will obviously take time out from the academics for any conversations that need to take place, and there will be a lot of support there. All in all, we want the kids to reconnect with their friends and classroom teachers, and I think that's going to be the healthiest thing."
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Acquisition of Al Gore's cable channel gives al-Jazeera chance to establish a presence where it has had only limited reach Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network that has struggled to win space on US cable television, has acquired Current TV, the channel co-founded by former US vice-president Al Gore. The deal is intended to give al-Jazeera greater penetration into the US market. It will close Current and replace it with a new network, al-Jazeera America. Gore will become a member of the new network's advisory board. Current TV had struggled with viewers but is widely distributed on cable providers and reaches 60 million of the 100 million US households with cable or satellite service. But al-Jazeera America will face hurdles with US distributors and viewers, television industry analysts said. One of its distributors, Time Warner Cable, which accounted for about 12 million of those homes, announced late on Wednesday it was terminating its carriage deal with Current. "Our agreement with Current has been terminated and we will no longer be carrying the service. We are removing the service as quickly as possible," it said in a statement. Gore and business partner Joel Hyatt, who created the channel in 2005, confirmed the sale in a statement on Wednesday. The terms were undisclosed. "Current Media was built based on a few key goals: to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling," Gore and Hyatt said. "Al-Jazeera has the same goals and, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us." Al-Jazeera's reach in the US has struggled to move beyond the few large metropolitan areas, where some people can watch al-Jazeera English. The network's managing director, Tony Burman, in 2010 blamed a "very aggressive hostility" from the Bush administration for reluctance among cable and satellite companies to show the network. Al-Jazeera has attracted respect for its ability to build a serious news product in a short time. But there may be a culture clash at the network. Dave Marash, a former ABC Nightline reporter who worked for al-Jazeera in Washington, said he left the network in 2008 in part because he sensed an anti-US bias there. Current, meanwhile, began as a groundbreaking effort to promote user-generated content, and settled into a more conventional format of political talk television with a liberal bent. But it has largely been outflanked by MSNBC in its effort to be a liberal alternative to the leading cable news network, Fox News Channel. Gore worked on-air as an analyst during its recent election night coverage. Current is expected to post $114m (£70m) in revenue in 2013, according to research firm SNL Kagan. The firm pegged the network's cash flow at nearly $24m a year.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Acquisition of Al Gore's cable channel gives Al-Jazeera chance to establish a presence where it has had only limited reach Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network that has struggled to win space on US cable television, has acquired Current TV, the channel founded by Al Gore and business partner Joel Hyatt. Gore and Hyatt, who created the channel in 2005, confirmed the sale in a statement on Wednesday. The terms were undisclosed. The deal gives Al-Jazeera a bridgehead into the US market. Current TV, although struggling in the ratings, is widely distributed on US cable providers. Al-Jazeera will close Current TV and replace it with a new network, Al-Jazeera America. Gore will become a member of the new network's advisory board. "Current Media was built based on a few key goals: to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling," Gore and Hyatt said. "Al-Jazeera has the same goals and, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us." The acquisition could extend Al-Jazeera's reach beyond a few large US metropolitan areas, where some people can watch Al-Jazeera English. The network's managing director, Tony Burman, in 2010 blamed a "very aggressive hostility" from the Bush administration for reluctance among cable and satellite companies to show the network. Al-Jazeera has attracted respect for its ability to build a serious news product in a short time. But there may be a culture clash at the network. Dave Marash, a former ABC Nightline reporter who worked for Al-Jazeera in Washington, said he left the network in 2008 in part because he sensed an anti-American bias there. Current, meanwhile, began as a groundbreaking effort to promote user-generated content, but has settled into a more conventional format of political talk television with a liberal bent. Gore worked on-air as an analyst during its recent election night coverage. Former New York governor Elliot Spitzer, former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm and Cenk Uygur are its lead personalities. Current signed Keith Olbermann to be its main host in 2011 but his tenure lasted less than a year before it ended in bad blood on both sides. Current has largely been outflanked by MSNBC in its effort to be a liberal alternative to the leading cable news network, Fox News Channel. It hired former CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman in 2011 to be its president. Bohrman has pushed the network to innovate technologically, with election night coverage that emphasised social media conversation. Current is expected to post $114m (£70m) in revenue in 2013, according to research firm SNL Kagan. The firm pegged the network's cash flow at nearly $24m a year. While it has battled low viewership, it is now distributed in about 60m of the 100m homes in the US with cable or satellite service.
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